23 pages • 46 minutes read
AnonymousThe Wanderer
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 950A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Unbearable Logic of Fate
The Wanderer bears the burden of immense loss, but within the pagan culture that the Wanderer embodies, that difficult reality is rendered infinitely more difficult because it cannot be explained, save through the ever-fickle workings of chance, represented within Medieval culture by the concept of the Wheel of Fortune, or Rota Fortunae. It turns and some flourish, while others perish: “All is wretched in the realm of the earth / The way of fate changes the world under heaven” (Lines 106-07). Great armies rise but then fall, leaving survivors inevitably to question why: “What happened to the horse? What happened to the warrior? What happened to the gift-giver?” (Line 92).
Within the pagan culture, the questions can only be rhetorical. Why has the Wanderer lost his homeland, comrades, and liege? The Wanderer’s lyrical lamentation is expressed by questions he understands can never be answered, save by the logic—or illogic—of fate, leaving him only a difficult life of endurance and stoic acceptance.
In this, the lament of a soldier who has lost everything expands to a wider, universal philosophical posture: Nothing is reliable, achievement is ironic, expectation is pointless, and explanation beggars logic. Sorrow, then, is the inevitable and universal outcome, leaving each person, like the Wanderer, suspended between regret and despair, tormented by memories and haunted by dreams. That bleak vision here is remediated only through the frame of the first and last stanzas. They challenge such unbearable logic through the reassurance that a loving, mysterious God with a plan of His own controls what seems to be capricious and tragic. Take heart, the poem argues. All is for the best.
The Impact of Defeat on a Warrior
Although the frame of the poem extends its argument to a broad interest in suffering humanity itself, the narrative of the Wanderer is a study in the psychological impact of defeat on the psyche of a proud and fierce soldier. Because the Wanderer is too stoic to give in to messy confessions, that impact is recorded in what the Wanderer cannot control: his dreams and memories that make vivid the joyous feasting and the reassuring support of his generous lord, the Wanderer’s “head and hands […] at the gift-giver’s throne” (Lines 42-43), all gone.
A survivor of his homeland’s massive defeat, the Wanderer knows only regret and guilt. “The eager for glory,” he says, speaking lyrically of warriors who yearn for the acclamation of victory, “often bind / Something bloody close to their breasts” (Lines 17-18). That is the Wanderer’s reality. He has survived. He has left behind his comrades and his lord. They met death with dignity and courage on the field of battle. “The wounds of his heart are heavier” (Line 48) because he witnessed their glorious, if bloody, deaths but survived. There appears to the Wanderer no logic to explain why he survived and they, his “brave kinsman” (Line 61), so “suddenly sank to the floor” (Line 60).
The Wanderer explores the trauma experienced by courageous soldiers who survive defeat and must face the questions of why them and what now. The Wanderer’s fruitless years searching for some new identity, a new lord to whom he might pledge his allegiance, have left him wise, certainly, but heartbroken: “The good warrior must understand how ghostly it will be / When all this world of wealth stands wasted” (Lines 73-74).
The Psychological Effects of Isolation
More than 1,500 years before the rise in psychology first suggested the complexity of the mind and the implications of exploring behavior, The Wanderer provides a case study in the psychological effects of isolation (Warrington 2012) (See: Further Reading & Resources). Save the frame of the poem, a man talks to himself, or more specifically, to “his sorrows” (Line 6), suggesting the absence of the therapeutic chance to share them. He is alone: “Wretched, I tie my heart with ropes / Far from my home, far from my kinsman” (Lines 19-20).
Without the opportunity or even the expectation to unburden his sorrows to others, and cut off so absolutely from the joys of his past, the Wanderer has learned the hard lesson that to survive day to day, such sorrows cannot be dwelled upon. In his travels, and “in many places about this massive earth” (Line 75), he sees massive walls, like those of his own home, that have been “battered by the wind / Covered by frost, the roofs collapsed” (Lines 76-77). He struggles to understand how events—fate, within his pagan worldview—have left not just his home but many homes, and himself, in ruins. As he moves about the forbidding wintry landscape, he finds no consolation in the usual welcome refuges of dreams and memories. His comforting dreams of time spent at the foot of his generous lord are inevitably, rudely shattered by the return of the chill dawn. And memories of the rush of war, the “deadly slashes” (Line 91), side by side with his now-dead comrades, leave him only desolate and confused. Unavailable to the joy of Christianity that the speaker advocates, with its rich promise of an afterlife that rewards earthly travails, the Wanderer closes the poem as a case study in isolation, adrift, uncomforted and able to commit to no greater hope than living one step to the next.
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