The Wanderer

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 950

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Literary Context: The Anti-Hero

Long before the Medieval era, the epic literatures of Antiquity defined a hero as a brave, selfless, and noble larger-than-life figure, typically of great physical dimension and outstanding military acumen. Hercules, Achilles, Odysseus, Jason, and Perseus, to name the most familiar to contemporary readers, were courageous and cunning. They were tested by tribulations, overcoming dire odds. Favored by the gods themselves, they led their armies to victories of epochal proportions—victories, in turn, worth commemorating in grand poetry.

The Wanderer, however, defines a far different kind of hero, something of an anti-hero. The Wanderer himself is a failure. His cause is lost, his nation slaughtered, and he grapples with an awareness of that defeat. He is now alone, an outsider. As John Richardson (1988) argues, the Wanderer is caught between two worlds (See: Further Reading & Resources). He is doomed to be a survivor, adrift in a hostile world in which everything he has known is gone. Grizzled, tight-lipped, solitary, the Wanderer finds refuge only in stoicism. He refuses to concede to a hard and cold world beyond his control. That refusal to surrender to the logic of despair defines the anti-hero’s courage.

A millennium later, that character in part defines the familiar existential anti-hero of 20th-century film and literature, most notably Ernest Hemingway’s World War I survivors Jake Barnes (The Sun Also Rises) and Robert Jordan (For Whom the Bell Tolls); John Ford’s Ethan Edwards (The Searchers); Clint Eastwood’s Will Munny (The Unforgiven); any of the tormented wandering samurai in the early films of Akira Kurasawa; J. R. R. Tolkien’s Gandalf and Aragorn (The Lord of the Rings series); George R. R. Martin’s Jon Snow (A Song of Ice and Fire series); and even the brooding superheroes in Stan Lee’s Marvel Universe (Wolverine, for instance, or Batman or Loki). Like the Wanderer, they stoically bear the weight of loneliness and the scars of their defeat as they struggle heroically to find solace in a dark world in which they have no place.

Cultural Context: The Transition to Christianity

Medieval scholars posit that the poem’s first and last stanzas were most likely added centuries after the original ballad of the lonely Wanderer was first set down. That frame reveals how The Wanderer can be read as a culture-in-transition document, revealing the sea change from a pagan culture to a Christian culture.

The first stanza concludes with a forbidding theme: “Fate never wavers” (Line 5). How that line is read, however, reveals the importance of the frame structure. For the pagan Wanderer, he is fated for this life of ruin. In his world, there is no explanation for the dark reality he must now negotiate, no explanation for his titanic losses, save accepting the iron rule of chance: “Where are the sounds of joy?” (Line 93), he asks, not expecting an answer.

If the prologue-like first stanza, however, is read as the added frame of a Christian scribe centuries later, well into the Christian mission to convert the pagan cultures of Britain’s seacoast, Line 5 changes dramatically. Here, the framing speaker cautions, is what happens when a pagan cosmos is left in the control of fate. Line 5 is then delivered with harsh irony. The emotionally damaged Wanderer is the world without the radiant energy of a Creator God whose ways, while inscrutable, nevertheless reveal His plan, a manifestation of His merciful love for His fallen world. If Line 5 represents the wisdom of a later compiler, then the narrative of the Wanderer himself is less a psychological study of a survivor of battlefield defeat and more an inspirational Christian parable: Accept God’s love and render hopelessness itself ironic, an aspirational message proffered in the last stanza.