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The poem is set in the forbidding cold of midwinter: “A blanket of frost binds the earth” (Line 102). Winter, however, symbolizes one thing to the pagan Wanderer and something different to the framing Christian speaker.
For the Wanderer, as he walks along the frozen wastes of the sea with its black swells, the dead of winter symbolizes the dead end of his hopes, dreams, and joy. Winter embodies his dark interiority, anxieties, and despair. In turn, the cold suggests his “freezing heart” (Line 32), his isolation and loneliness, how he must live without the rewards of camaraderie and the support of his lord.
From the Wanderer’s pagan perspective, the winter symbolizes the harsh energy of fate and his helplessness (Richardson 1988) (See: Further Reading & Resources). His fortunes have risen and collapsed without his control, much as the seasons move one to the next.
For the Christian speaker, however, winter symbolizes the Wanderer’s last, best hope. Winter is a season. It is not permanent. And, although the actual movement of the seasons is beyond the control or understanding of humanity, move they do. Within the Christian perspective introduced in the poem’s frame, winter represents the hope of transition into spring, specifically the soul’s movement toward the redemptive, transformative grace of God’s love.
At the heart of the Wanderer’s emotional crisis is the bond lost with his lord. The relationship between a vassal and his lord was one of most significant bonds in Medieval culture. The closeness of that relationship forms one of the Wanderer’s fondest memories: “It seems in his heart that he holds and kisses / The lord of the troop and lays on his knee / His head and hands” (Lines 40-42). And the loss of that relationship—his lord is now dead, a shadow in a “hole in the ground” (Line 21)—creates for the Wanderer his most profound trauma.
In feudal society, a man who pledges loyalty to the lord of the fiefdom, or region where they live and where the lord controls operations, is rewarded for his fealty with dignity, personal identity, and a kinship with the lord’s other vassals. Pledging allegiance to a powerful lord gave some vassals, especially warriors or knights, access to great wealth. Many lived at court. In turn, the lord, like a surrogate father, offered the vassals his wisdom and provided their days with purpose and meaning. In return for the lord’s largesse, vassals defended the fiefdom, often sacrificing their lives in the name of their lord. For his lord to have died in the war that the Wanderer survived is a matter of shame and guilt to the Wanderer. His futile search for a new lord leaves his days empty.
For the framing speaker, the symbol of the Wanderer’s dead lord contrasts with the offer extended for the Wanderer to find genuine relief by investing his fealty in the love of the immortal Christian Lord.
Given the increasingly desolate confessions of the lonely Wanderer and the dark revelations of his despair, the Wanderer ends the poem (Lines 73-87) contemplating a massive building, most likely a fort, its walls in ruins, symbolizing his emotional and psychological endgame. He has come to the end; this insurmountable, unscalable wall initially then symbolizes the warrior’s absence of hope.
In the poem’s penultimate section, the Wanderer—as he concedes that in this world, “[e]very day falls to dust (Line 62)—imagines how all around him, grand fortresses built by the mighty fall to ruin. “[N]ow” he laments, “in many places about this massive earth / Walls stand battered by the wind / Covered by frost, the roofs collapsed” (Lines 75-77). The unrelenting power of the winds and the hard pressure of continuous snowfalls symbolize, within the Wanderer’s pagan awareness, nature as a manifestation of the same grim, unstoppable fate that destroyed the Wanderer’s army itself. Nothing survives, the Wanderer intones: “All is wretched in the realm of the earth” (Line 106).
The ruined walls of the mighty fortress then symbolize the arrogance of humanity, the vulnerability of the finest and most extravagantly conceived human endeavors, and ultimately the hard play of nature itself. Locked within its iron logic, all is futility. All things—the most formidable structures, the grandest armies, the savviest warriors, the mightiest kingdoms—all must come to ruin, an apocalyptic vision in which “the strongholds of the giants [stand] empty / Without the sounds of joy of the city-dwellers” (Lines 86-87). Absent the Christian admonition in the final stanza, the poem ends on this forbidding wisdom: “All of the earth will be empty” (Line 110).
By Anonymous