Woriað Þa Winsalo: The bonds of exile in “The Wanderer”

Abstract

The Old English elegy “The Wanderer” poignantly dramatizes a transition from the pre-Christian world of the Germanic comitatus, in which the self is fashioned though the social bonding of lord and companions in the meadhall, to the more individualistic guilt-culture of Christianity. As the speaker recalls to himself the isolation resulting from the fragmentation of the war-band, he internalizes the forms of hall-enclosure. The poem's imagery describes a painful but necessary process of self-enclosure that will sustain the wanderer until his final inclusion in a heavenly fœstnung. The process is characterized by the opposition of wyrd to metud, terms that in Old English literature are often opposed. The former is an exterior, chaotic force antagonistic to humanity's enclosures while the latter represents the Christian God in its aspect of creator and protector of cosmic order. The speaker's strange lament that “the wine-halls wander” should not be emended or translated away, for it is part of the poem's complex association of hall and self.