The Wanderer

The Wanderer, one of the oldest extant poems in the English language, is a psychological study of an embattled warrior now in exile, a survivor of a war his homeland lost. He wanders an unforgiving wintry landscape grieving his devastated homeland, his slaughtered people, and, most poignantly, his murdered lord. The Wanderer has lost everything that matters to him, and, brooding and broken, he struggles to understand his isolation and sorrows. The elegiac poem explores the conflict within this defeated warrior between his profound sense of loss and the stoic code of the soldier not to give in to such emotions, to bear great suffering in courageous silence. Only in the poem’s framing first and last stanzas, most likely added by a later writer, does the poem offer as consolation the Christian idea of the ruined world as a pilgrim-state, everything in it impermanent as each soul journeys toward the radiant stability found only in God.

Medieval scholars speculate on the poem’s author as well as the century of the poem’s composition, most likely the fifth century. However, the poem’s importance is modern. The Wanderer’s heroic, if dark, vision has influenced modern writers Ernest Hemingway, J. R. R. Tolkien, and George R.