Those Who Wander: The Anglo-Saxon Elegies

They say that not all those who wander are lost.  Well, two of the most famous poems of the Anglo-Saxon era are about wandering and seeking.  We'll discuss "The Wanderer" and "The Seafarer" from the Exeter Book, which not only take us into the minds of the seekers, but also show us evidence of the tremendous changes afoot as England begins to embrace the Christian religion.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Classic English Literature Podcast, a show about the greatest hits of English lit (with a few deep cuts to make you buy the new album).  This is episode 4: All Who Wander: The Anglo-Saxon Elegies.

Remember to like and follow the podcast on the Instatwitbook pages and you can email me at classicenglishliterature@gmail.com. 

I was making my way home the other day when I pulled up behind a Jeep at a stop light.  The spare wheel had a cover depicting a compass and the reminder: “Not all those who wander are lost.”  The Hobbits in the audience will recognize that line from a poem the wizard Gandalf recites in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.  But I bring up this otherwise utterly unimportant vignette for a couple of reasons – only one of which, unfortunately, is related to today’s poems.

Firstly – and cynically – I don’t really imagine the driver of the Jeep was romantically and dreamily wandering the byways of my small provincial city.  Far more likely she was on her way to Panera for a salad.

Secondly, despite the Jeep’s towering suspension, massive mud tires, and hood snorkel, I don’t believe the owner uses it to wander much at all.  Not a scratch on the paint, not a smear of mud – not a sign, in short, that this Jeep has ever been off road, never wandered beyond the asphalt lanes prescribed and maintained by the local highway department.  Though it bears a quite macho aesthetic, this Jeep and its driver have never been on safari, have never struck across the desert on a geological expedition, have never discovered the Lost City of Wheredoyoucallit.

Which brings me to the third point in this increasingly desultory digression (can you digress before you’ve even started?  I must look that up).  And that is: Can one even get lost anymore?  I’d be willing to bet my last donut that that Jeep had a satellite navigation system or that the driver had some similar app on her phone.  I’ll wager that last rainbow sprinkled that this driver has not only rarely wandered, but has, in fact, never been lost.  Google has mapped the world – getting actually, physically lost is nearly impossible in the 21st century.  We only use the word “lost” in this sense metaphorically: as in being confused about something (“I’m totally lost about this Jeep story”).  We may lose our tempers, lose a game, or be at a loss for words, but it’s increasingly difficult to get lost in the world.  We’ve looked the whole thing over with our satellite cameras, and we found no dragons at the edges.  In fact, we found no edges.

Which finally brings me to today’s poems.  They are two elegies from the Exeter Book called “The Wanderer” (ah, you’ve twigged the connection!) and “The Seafarer.”  I think they have a really useful connection to Beowulf’s funeral and its cultural significance that we spoke about last time.

First, let’s deal with the definition.  An elegy is a poem that laments the passing away of a glorious period, a golden age, and this lamentation is usually occasioned by the death of someone close.  You may notice that the word “elegy” sounds a bit like our word “eulogy,” which is the speech someone gives at a funeral.  The words are related.  In both of today’s poems, the speaker (or speakers) are prompted to ruminate on the changeability of the world because they have lost their lord.  And I do use the verb “lost” advisedly here – not only as a euphemism for death but also in that the speaker cannot find his way back to some essential connection that gave meaning to his life.

So let’s look at “The Wanderer.”  As I did for Beowulf, I’m using the Burton Raffel translations here.   

[read poem]

There is a lot going on in this poem.  So let me focus on one big, overarching question: how many speakers do we hear?  This has been a matter of some scholarly debate, but let me ballpark it for you.  The issue mostly stems from the fact that the first seven lines seem to function as a prologue: the “lonely traveller” is introduced, we are told that he is longing for mercy, that he is plagued by memory, and then we hear him actually speak on line eight.  

OK, easy enough: two speakers.  Some kind of narrator and the Wanderer himself.  The opening lines set up a mystery: why is the Wanderer longing for grace and God’s mercy?  We are told in line 5 that he is in “exile.”  Is that some kind of criminal sentence?  Has he been banished from the posse comitatus for failing to protect or avenge his lord?  Line 7 says that his kinsmen have been slaughtered.  Is it a penance imposed by a priest for reconciliation?  Has the Wanderer condemned himself to exile?  Difficult to say, because the Wanderer’s speech which spans the bulk of the poem is not forthcoming with such details.  He says in line 21 that he has been “forced to flee the darkness that fell” but that could be taken either literally or figuratively.  He also articulates an almost stoic belief that “silence is noble and sorrow / Nothing that speech can cure.”  That may indicate a self-imposed banishment.

At any rate, we do know what he initially hopes to find in his exile: “a place, a people, a lord to replace / My lost ones” (ll. 25-26).  Now here’s where things get a bit interesting.  That third stanza – or verse paragraph – begins and ends with two fragmentary lines: “Leaving everything” and “leaving nothing.”  In between we have a catalogue of his bereavement, his yearning for the physical presence of his dead lord.  When he says that he “left everything” to go into exile, I don’t quite believe him: clearly he still has many attachments, emotionally and mentally.  He focuses on loss, the passing of that glorious time.  He is, at this point, and understandably, focused on the disruption to his accustomed way of life and the values, rituals, and behaviors that gave it significance.  Now, I know I’m playing word games a bit here, because the final fragmentary line “leaving nothing” grammatically refers to the dissolving visions of his kin, their “ghosts” if you will.  But I like to think of the phrase as also a bit of a realization – that he has lost everything, but hasn’t been able to leave it behind.  He has, psychologically, left nothing.

Because then we get a really interesting little adjective to describe the world: “brief.”  The world, and human life in it, is temporary, evanescent.  “All things must pass” as another great English poet tells us.  The Wanderer’s perception begins to shift.  He tells us that “Wisdom is slow, and comes / But late” and that “what knowing man knows not the ghostly, / Waste-like end of worldly wealth.”  The alliteration is particularly effective in these lines.  He notes the wreckage around him: “the wind-swept halls,” the “storm-beaten blocks,” the “mead-halls crumbled.”  He says the “Maker of men lays waste this earth.”  God crushes worldly ambitions.  As in Beowulf, we have a very Old Testament vision of God – a god of power, justice, and wrath more than of mercy.  To realize that human works will be withered is the start of wisdom.  So says the Wanderer.

And then he moves into one of the key formal elements of the Anglo-Saxon elegy: the ubi sunt passage.  Ubi sunt is Latin for “where are” and this is the point in the poem when the speaker asks where are the great things of the past?  Where have they gone: the war-steeds, the warriors, the feasting-places, the mead-hall pleasures?  The bright cup, the brave knight, the glorious princes all gone.

To yearn for these is folly, for as he says, “Fortune vanishes, friendship vanishes, / Man is fleeting, woman is fleeting, / And all this earth rolls into emptiness.”  There are echoes here of Ecclesiastes, one of the Hebrew wisdom books in the Bible.  The vanity, the futility, of all things.   No sense of salvation, no purpose, no (as Aristotle would say) telos or end goal.

Then, we seem to get an epilogue in the last five or six lines: “So says the sage in his heart.”  Again, like Ecclesiastes, but who is the sage in “The Wanderer”?  Is it the Wanderer himself?  The narrator that seems to be present at the beginning?  

This question of how many speakers is quite vexing, because it’s difficult to know whether or not the Wanderer character has experienced any enlightenment.  He may be just an example of human failure and restlessness that the Sage points out to us as a caveat: the Wanderer suffers because he is a fool.  Or does the Wanderer come to some understanding of the world’s transient betrayal, and the epilogue is the Sage’s approval of his growth, like Yoda approving of Luke Skywalker’s tumbling abilities.

Or again, and this is the one I like: there is only the Wanderer, alone and self-regarding.  He reflects as a Sage on his life as a Wanderer.  And he ends his poem by saying, “It’s good to find your grace in God, the heavenly rock where rests our every hope.”

I find the end of this poem unsatisfying, though.  The “God” thing feels tacked on, which is why some scholars argue that the beginning and the ending here are later Christian additions to an earlier, probably pagan, work.  For all the misery and near-nihilism of the monologue, the epilogue says, “Trust in God.”  Feels trite.  Dismissive even.  I’m reminded of people, at a funeral say, and you’re grieving, can’t see a future without the person you’ve lost, and someone comes up and says, “Well, it was God’s will.”  I want to blast’em in the face!  They mean well, I guess, but it is at least tone-deaf, if not disrespectful.

Which is why I am following in the footsteps of many teachers over many decades by pairing “The Wanderer” with another famous Anglo-Saxon elegy: “The Seafarer.”  Similar set-up to the last poem, but we’re out in the North Sea.

[read poem]

There’s no ambiguity about the speaker here: the Seafarer asserts his own experience, the meaning he has assigned it, and his possession of both.  First line, outta the gate: “This tale is true, and mine.”  Asserting authority.  Boom.

Then we get a lengthy description of the sea, not so much as a setting (though it is that) but as a phenomenon: that is, an experience with significance.  The Seafarer personifies the sea: it “takes” him, sweeping him back and forth in sorrow and pain, it shows him suffering.  Hmm. . .  just thought of this: the sea kind of seems like a sage here, a demonstrator of wisdom.  Have to think about that some more.

What we do have is the poet invoking a very old interpretation of the sea as chaos: ultimate disorder.  This is what we call in the trade an archetypal symbol.  An archetype, or archetypal symbol, is a symbol that is transcultural and transhistorical.  What does that mean?  It means that it’s a symbol that would have roughly the same meaning to any culture on earth at any time.  Some symbols are really bound to a certain time and place.  Like, take a Valentine heart.  We know nowadays, in modern Western culture, that a Valentine heart is a symbol for love.  But if we hopped in our Delorean, fired up the flux capacitor, and raced off to ancient Egypt at 88 mph, they wouldn’t know what that heart was supposed to mean.  

But if we said that the sea is a symbol of chaos, they’d get it.  In fact, the opening lines of the Bible talk about the sea that way: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.”  And the Babylonian creation myth, called the Enuma Elish (which most scholars believe to be a major influence on Genesis) personifies the sea as the goddess Tiamat, the chaos of primordial creation that has to be conquered by the god Marduke so that order can be established and civilization begin.  And you can see that in cultures all over the world and throughout time.

Which is all to say that the poet is dealing in some heavy duty symbolism with a quite distinguished pedigree.

I’ve always been interested in another symbolic move the poet makes in line 8: “My feet were cast in icy bands, bound with frost, with frozen chains.”  Now, usually, you’d see this, as the language suggests, as a symbol of bondage, imprisonment.  And ice is often seen as a symbol of stasis, you know, the inability to move, to progress.  It makes sense here: the Seafarer is wandering the ocean in winter, he’s miserable – he’s literally frozen to his ship.  A prisoner.

Which makes an interesting link with something he says a bit later: “And who could believe[ . . . ] how often, how wearily, I put myself back on the paths of the sea.”  I think that’s really mind-blowing.  He’s doing this to himself.  He’s not just an object that the sea is toying with, knocking him around.  He’s compelled by something deep inside him, he’s obsessed with finding something.  He’s bound to do so.  There’s a hunger he can’t satisfy. 

We’ve got a very different situation than in the Wanderer.  There, the Wanderer is an exile, under some kind of punishment, perhaps.  He’s been cast away.  But the Seafarer casts himself away – he’s responding to some deep psychological need that civilized life on land can’t satisfy.  And he’s afraid of it: he says there’s no one so great and bold that he “feels no fear as the sails unfurl.”  He’s asking questions and he’s afraid of the answers. This guy’s got an inner life, a personality.  We don’t see hints of this kind of psychological roundness very often in ancient literatures. 

I wonder if this fear is rooted in a dissatisfaction with the answers he’s been given by his tradition.  Like the Wanderer, he realizes that “the wealth of the world neither reaches to heaven nor remains.”  You can’t take it with you.  But the Seafarer goes further and questions the very base of pagan heroism and immortality:

The praise the living pour on the dead

Flowers from reputation: plant

An earthly life of profit reaped

Even from hatred and rancour, of bravery

Flung in the devil’s face, and death 

Can only bring you earthly praise

And a song to celebrate a place

With the angels, life eternally blessed

In the hosts of heaven. 

For traditional Germanic warrior cultures, there is no Heaven after death, not in the way we who are familiar with the Christian tradition imagine it.  Rather, immortality came from living memory: the glory you earned in life kept you alive in the songs of the scops.  That’s why Beowulf mocks Unferth – I’ve not heard great things about you.  It’s condemnation, not snark.  And it’s why Beowulf asks for a monument.  He needs to be remembered if he is to be immortal.

Here, the Seafarer seems ambivalent about that idea.  He doesn’t reject it, but when he says glory can “only” bring earthly praise, he seems to be emphasizing a desire for a more substantial afterlife.

He reinforces this with his own ubi sunt passage: where are the kingdoms of earth, the rulers, emperors, the givers of gold (kenning alert!).  Power vanishes, pleasure dies.  “All glory is tarnished.”

And then we get what I think is the most significant passage, culturally speaking, in the elegies.  The Seafarer declares a new morality.  Not one based on comitatus, glory, and courage, but one based on humility, compassion, and meekness.  He says:

He who lives humbly has angels from heaven

To carry him courage and strength and belief.

A man must conquer pride, not kill it,

Be firm with with his fellows, chaste for himself,

Treat all the world as the world deserves,

With love or with hate but never with harm.

This is an entire repudiation of Beowulf’s ethic.  Courage and strength come from God, not from ourselves.  One must be humble, fair-minded, modest, and gentle.  We do not get this from Beowulf’s boasts when he first arrives at Heorot.  The Seafarer is moving from a Germanic ethic to a Christian one.  This is a huge shift in Anglophonic culture.  There had been Christian missions to the Anglo-Saxons going back to 597 and St. Augustine of Canterbury.  But now it seems to have fully seeped into the cultural system.  Paganism is on the wane.

The Seafarer ends his poem by urging action, not wallowing in anxiety.  He says, “Our thoughts should turn to where our home is.”  The Wanderer has realized this too.  But the Seafarer adds, “Consider the ways of coming there.”  Home, of course, is Heaven, and the way to get there is to embrace an entirely different set of values, and live according to them in order to “rise to that eternal joy.”  The last word of the poem is “amen.”  The Seafarer ends as a prayer, a gesture of hope and not an acquiescence to Fate.

I think this poem is crucial for understanding the major swerve in English culture and history.  At this point, England could have gone two ways – it could have held on to the Scandinavian world where it had its cultural roots: the Danes, the Norse – those pagan warrior societies.  Or it could have set its sights south, to mainland Europe and Christendom.  Obviously, it went with the latter and history has played out the consequences.  But this poem sits on the fault line of that decision, at the fork in that road.  

The other thing I like about this poem is that it reconceives human life as a pilgrimage, a religiously-inspired journey.  And the pilgrimage will become the dominant metaphor for human life for the rest of the middle ages.  In fact, it’s still with us – how many times have we heard the cliche that life is a journey?  Too, too many, for my taste.  We’ve just secularized the metaphor.

But it's a metaphor that helps us deal with the greatest anxiety of human existence: change.  What I’ve called mutability in this podcast.  It’s the thing we’re most afraid of, we long for stability, predictability.  Think about it: we buy insurance, invest and start savings accounts, we exercise, we get educated – all in an effort to control or absorb the possibility of negative change.

When the Seafarer speaks of “eternity,” this is what he means.  We tend to think of eternity as “endless time.”  You know, the timeline starts at a certain point and just goes on forever.  But that’s not really what some philosophers and theologians mean.  What they mean, and what I think the Seafarer means too, is that eternity isn’t endless time, but the opposite of time.  That space where time no longer obtains, where there is no flux, where all is immutable, stable.  Free from the pressures of FOMO or YOLO or carpe diem.  Unchanging.

So, to tie these last two episodes together.  Remember last time I said that the Monk transcribing Beowulf had a great respect for his protagonist and the culture he represented, but that they were insufficient. Beowulf was the greatest hero, but he’s gone.  His time passed.   I think today, the Wanderer thinks so, too.  The Wanderer keeps looking for another earthly lord to follow in that comitatus bond.  But if these are the diagnosis of the problem of mutability, then the Seafarer has the prescription.   The Seafarer says: Look for a Heavenly Lord, one who does not die, one who is unchanging.  Replace Beowulf with Jesus of Nazareth.

Wow, phew.  Remember to like and follow the Classic English Literature podcast on the Instatwitbook.  Email me at classicenglishliterature@gmail.com.  Please like and subscribe on your favorite podcatcher.  I’d be ever so humbled by positive comments and reviews that will help others to discover the podcast.

Next time, we’ll start moving into what are sometimes called the High Middle Ages.  We’ll talk about the conquest by Norman and all the changes he wrought.  Till then, good luck!