The Wanderer

The analogy between the foreign exile and the fallen human soul

The heroic epic Beowulf is justly famed above all other Anglo-Saxon poems, but it’s not exactly representative of that corpus. Much more of it consists of Biblical paraphrases, saints’ lives, and other Christian matter recast and retold through the Old English poetic language. Since the traditional formulas of that language had been handed down from the pre-Christian Germanic hero-poetry evoked by Beowulf,¹ this recasting and retelling entailed the ‘recycling’ of these words and phrases into new usages on the basis of analogy with the old ones. For example, Andreas begins with a rousing paean to twelve “thanes of the king” (þeodnes þegnas), who turn out to be none other than the Twelve Apostles.

In other poems, this recycling extends beyond formulas to put new spins on wider heroic themes.² One of these themes is that of the wandering exile, or wrecca – a word and concept somewhat akin to the Japanese rounin, or lordless samurai, and suggestive of anything from a wretched tramp to a legendary knight-errant. Whoever wrote the poem now known as The Wanderer was well attuned to these mixed connotations, and came up with³ a compelling analogy between the homesick exile in foreign lands and the fallen soul of man in this world.

This analogy is the key to the whole poem (and one that slipped through the fingers of many early critics, who failed to see the relation of the exile theme to the homily on worldly impermanence and assumed that they had been spatchcocked together). The title Wanderer, which I have retained for the sake of recognition, does not actually come from the word wrecca but from eardstapa (‘land-roamer’) and was presumably chosen to differentiate a landroving theme in this poem from the nautical one of The Seafarer. In reality there is no such difference of theme, as the ‘wanderer’ of this poem spends plenty of lines on the sea (as does the ‘seafarer’ of the other one on land); and I would suggest that the seafaring element is fundamental not only to the exile theme but also to the religious analogy. Land-scenes and sea-scenes shift and merge in these poems, just as all earthly security dissolves into mutability and impermanence.

There are other little offshoots of the central analogy that are all too liable to be hacked away in translation. For example, near the beginning of the poem there is a little homily on the ‘noble custom’ (indryhten þeaw) of locking up one’s ‘soul-chest’ (ferðloca) so that nothing ‘dreary’ (dreorig) can escape. From the context we gather that the poet is talking about thoughts in the mind, and that his ‘noble custom’ is more or less what Gurdjieff called “non-expression of negativity”. Yet indryhten is more precisely ‘lordly’, that is to say ‘knightly’; fer(h)ð means not only ‘soul’ but also ‘life’, so ferðloca could be ‘mind’ or ‘heart’ but also ‘body’, and the act of locking or binding it could refer to the donning of armour; and dreorig means not only ‘dreary’ or ‘gloomy’ but also ‘bloody’ or ‘gory’. To translate these lines without due ambiguity is to lose the meaning, which is that the spiritual exile must discipline his despairing thoughts just as the wandering hero binds his body in armour.

Despite the risk of missing other such instances, I’ve opted for less literalism here than in my previous Beowulf translations (many of which, like this one, had to be autistically literal because they were written to argue some point). For example, the Old English word wyrd (often translated as ‘fate’, but in reality more like ‘eventuality’, hence the word wyrdwritere for ‘historian’) has been disintegrated into many modern English words and concepts, and I wanted to illustrate that here. I have retained the ‘alliterative’ English meter, with less assimilation of sounds than in previous translation posts (only assimilating t- to th-, s- to sh-, f- to v- and vowels to h-), and reproduced what I could of the several secondary effects found in the original poem.

Each line should be read with a four-stressed rhythm, except those at the very end, which are a bit ‘special’ and have to be read with a three-stress beat. Maybe at some point I will add an audio reading to help with this.

Oft a loner may look   to his lord's grace, 
The mercy of his judge,   though with a mind weighed down 
O'er the ways of water,   wide and long, 
He must stir with his oar-strokes   ice-cold seas, 
On long lanes of exile.   Life went its way.  

So spoke a wanderer –   woes recalling, 
Cruel clashes, killing-fields,   and kinsmen's ruin –  
Always, when alone,   ere the light has dawned, 
I bemoan my sorrows   and bespeak my thoughts, 
Though there is no-one else around,   and to none now living 
May I open up my heart.   I have always known 
That it's a noble custom   for a knight to keep 
The coffer of his soul   under key and lock – 
Protect his treasure-chest,   think what he will. 
Our hap is not endured   with a haggard mind, 
And an infuriated will   can avail us not. 
He who yearns after glory   his guttedness 
In the locker of his breast   has to bind secure.  

Thus have I   mine inmost thoughts, 
My neverending wretchedness –   ripped from homeland, 
Sundered from kinsmen –   shackled tight 
Since the day long ago   when in a deep hole 
I laid my protector,   and lowly evermore 
Went upon the wave-band,   winter-bitten, 
Sought out, hall-sick,  a sharer of treasures 
Wherever I might find one,   far and near, 
Someone in some mead-hall   who might have heard of me, 
Or wished to console    one without friends, 
And win him with some warmth.   Well does one learn 
How cruel a companion   is cold sorrow 
To one who can rely not   on loyal protectors. 
No wound-patterned gold,   but the ways of exile; 
Not earthly bounty,   but an ice-locked heart. 
He remembers the hall-thanes   and hoard-sharing 
In the flower of his youth –   how he was feasted, cared for, 
By his friend and lord.   Delight is gone.  

No little does he know,   who has long forgone 
His lord's instruction   that steered him aright, 
How sleep and sorrow   conspire oft together 
To set upon the lonely one   and suddenly bind him: 
It seems to him in mind   that he sees his lord – 
Clasps at him and kisses him,   and comes to lay 
His hands and his head   upon the hoard-guard's knees, 
Just as often, in the old days,   he honoured the throne. 
Then he wakes in a flash,   the friendless wretch, 
And all that fills his vision   are the fallow waves. 
Seagulls are bathing,   spreading their feathers; 
Snow and sleet fall,   spliced with hailstones. 
Longing after loved ones   laps his heart-scars; 
The weight of sorrow   sets on him anew, 
As memories of kinsmen   through his mind go flitting; 
He hails them with greetings,   eyes yearning 
For the sight of those he loved;   but they swim off fleetly, 
Those seafaring spirits,   and speak no words 
In his familiar tongue.   Troubles flood back 
To he who has to send,   over and again, 
O'er the binding of the waves,   his weary soul.  

And so I cannot light upon   a single reason 
Why my spirit does not blacken,   in the bounds of the world, 
When I think throughout the whole   of our human life: 
How suddenly surrendered   were the stronghold-halls 
Of the mightiest of men;   how this middle-earth, 
Over day after day,   ever deeper falls; 
And so wisdom comes to none   who weather not a share 
Of winters in this world.   The wise wait long: 
With not too hot a heart,   nor too hasty a tongue, 
Nor weakness in the fight,   nor a want of prudence, 
Not too gutless, not too heady,   nor too greedy for reward, 
Nor too quick to make a pledge   before the path is clear. 
He who bets upon his honour   ought to bide his time 
Until his soul-storm subsides,   and he sees more clearly 
Whither goes his heart-wish   and what he should do. 

He will grasp, if he is bright enough,   how ghastly it will be 
When all the wealth of this earth   has gone to waste and rot – 
As in the wrecked and the ruined parts   around this world, 
Where the wind whirls howling   round the open walls; 
Snow-swept, frost-decked,   shelter to none. 
The high halls have crumbled;   the kings lie dead; 
The merriment is ended;   the hardmen fallen 
Defiant by their walls.   Some by foes were taken, 
And borne upon their way;   one the bird hoisted 
High over the seascape;   the hoar-white wolf 
Divided one with death;   and one with face bedraggled 
Hid away another   in a hollow scrape. 
Thus wasted by the will   of the World-Creator, 
Wonder-works of titans   stand totally empty, 
The clamour of the town-dwellers   quelled to silence.  
One who saw those walls,   and sobered thought 
Throughout all the depths   of this darkened life, 
With a soul long-seasoned,   scanning memories 
Of clashes and of killings,   quoth these words: 
Where is the horse? Where is the hero?   Where is the hoard-guard lord? 
Where is the table for the feast?   Where are the times of joy? 
Alas for the mead-cup!   Alas for the knight! 
Alas for princes' pomp!   It has passed away 
Beneath the night-helm's shade,   like it had never been! 
In the stead of the companions   there stands at last 
A high wall-frieze   etched with worms. 
Before a host of ash-spears   hungry for blood, 
The old guard have fallen   to infamous fate; 
Now storms come clashing   round the standing rocks; 
Frost-flakes are falling   to fetter the earth; 
The winter wind wails;   the world gets dark; 
The night-shadows knit;   and from the north comes 
A hollering hailstorm   to harrow us men. 
In the world under heaven   all is hard to come by, 
And turned to reversal,   eventually. 
Our prosperity is fleeting,   and ourselves are fleeting; 
Our comrades are fleeting   and our kinsmen fleeting. 
All the fundament of earth   falls to void and waste.  

So spoke a sage in his mind,    Sitting aside as he mused. 
He is good who girds his faith, and never his grief laments, 
Bursting his breast too soon, Before the balm is known. 
A hero must act with boldness, and seek the honour of grace 
From the hand of the Father in heaven, Where our safest harbour stands. 

1. In truth, of course, Beowulf also falls into the category of Christian literary poetry, and represents a bid to ‘rehabilitate’ some aspects of the Germanic heroic past for a monkish audience sometimes inclined to bigotry against it. The assumption that it reflects the pre-Christian oral tradition must rest in part on a faith in the poet’s sense of traditional versimilitude and avoidance of anachronism – which, for example, precludes his mentioning Christ, the Saviour, redemption etc. in the pre-conversion setting of the poem. It is interesting in this context that he does not shrink from portraying the most wise and virtuous Germanic pagans as de facto monotheists – perhaps because he has retrojected this tendency onto them, but perhaps also because it really existed among them, as it did among the Greek and Roman philosophers and the Vedic sages of India.

2. Recall here that a formula is “a group of words which is regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea” (Milman Parry), whereas a theme is a recurring scene or event-pattern such as feasting, journeying, battle, etc.

3. That is, assuming the analogy was not already conventional, or even to some extent traditional.