The Wandering Pilgrim: Christian Asceticism in

The Wanderer and The Seafarer

by

Greg Lippiatt

English and Fine Arts/History

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for

Institute Honors

Virginia Military Institute

Lexington, Virginia

April 2009

Approved:

_________________________________________

Colonel Alan Baragona

Adviser

_________________________________________

Colonel Robert L. McDonald

Chair, Institute Honors Committee

__________________________________________

Brigadier General R. Wane Schneiter

Deputy Superintendent for Academics

and Dean of the Faculty

i

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………ii

Abstract………………………………………………………………………...iii

The Wandering Pilgrim…………………………………………………………1

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………...25

ii

Acknowledgments

I am deeply indebted to the Institute Honours Programme not only for its support of

this project but also for my entire cadetship. The generous scholarship provided by the

programme has made it possible for me to attend the Virginia Military Institute, and for that I

am deeply grateful. In addition, it has helped to make this paper possible by giving me time,

academic support, and academic credit for its research and execution. In particular, I would

like to thank Colonel Robert McDonald, Associate Dean, for his support, friendship, and

mentoring through the Institute Honours Programme during the four years of my cadetship. I

must also mention Dr. Simon Horobin, professor of medieval English literature and Fellow

of Magdalen College, Oxford, who first exposed me to The Wanderer and The Seafarer

while I studied abroad in Oxford during the spring of 2007. The greatest gratitude for this

project goes to Colonel Alan Baragona, professor of English and fine arts, who has served as

a mentor to me for three years and has opened the door to medieval literature and

medievalism in general for me. Without his support and encouragement, I am doubtful I

would have had the skills necessary to complete this project, and I deeply appreciate his

continued role as educator and guide to the world of medieval literature. I certainly would

not have been able to undertake this project without his help in finding and selecting relevant

secondary sources as we navigated our way through the sea of linguistic analysis and literary

criticism surrounding Old English poetry. A heartfelt thank-you to you all.

iii

Abstract

The Wanderer and The Seafarer are often studied together as examples of Old

English elegies, and the details about the poems‟ purposes and techniques have been debated

ad nauseum. However, these two works share more than simply a common theme or

premise. The characters of the speakers of the two poems embody two stages of the

development of the Christian ascetic within the Germanic tradition of Anglo-Saxon society.

The Wanderer and the Seafarer are both very much products of their age, but they

demonstrate radical breaks from temporal pagan warrior values as they embrace the pursuit

of Christian spiritual enlightenment. The Wanderer describes the involuntary ejection of a

secular thane into the position of exile and ultimately neophyte Christian ascetic, while The

Seafarer expands on these themes to paint a picture of the voluntary, mature peregrinus pro

amore Dei. Taken together, these poems illustrate a journey from secular and temporal

concerns to the spiritual and eternal concerns of the ascetic within the context of Anglo-

Saxon England.

1

The literary tradition of pre-Norman England contains a rich convergence between

pagan Germanic culture and Christian themes. One vein of this Old English tradition was the

so-called „elegies,‟ a genre that bears only incidental kinship with its Greco-Roman

namesake. Two of the most famous of these elegies are The Wanderer and The Seafarer, two

poems about religious exile that appear close to each other in the Old English manuscript

codex, the Exeter Book. These poems have traditionally been categorised as elegies,

mournful dirges for lost comforts strongly influenced by pagan Germanic values. There is

much truth in this association; however, the classification as „elegy‟ is an artificial one that

overlooks the deeper Christian themes of the pieces. While there is no evidence that they

were composed by the same author or even in the same period, the characters of the

Wanderer and the Seafarer express two stages of the ascetic Christian journey as embodied

by an Anglo-Saxon man who turns from the pursuits of a secular warrior and chases after the

extreme devotion of spiritual service. As such, they model the evolution of the medieval

character of the pilgrim without a physical destination, the idea of peregrinato pro amore

Dei.

The Anglo-Saxons were not an indigenously Christian race, but instead converted

from Germanic paganism in the early seventh century. While the Romano-British

inhabitants of Britain had Christianised with the rest of the Roman Empire, they lived in a

remote outpost of that crumbling state and were soon cut off from the rest of the Church by

the barbarian invasions that signalled the twilight of Rome. Several of these Germanic tribes

invaded Britain herself, either completely displacing or assimilating the native Britons, who

were then confined—along with their Christian religion—to the mountains of Wales or the

moors of Cornwall (Godfrey 35-6). The races which supplanted the Britons originally hailed

2

from present-day northern Germany and the Danish peninsula. They fell into three main

groups: Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. As time passed and their various kingdoms merged and

shifted, these names became to some extent interchangeable, and they are now known as

Anglo-Saxons (59-60). Initially invited to serve as foreign levies for the Britons, they soon

arrived in Britain in force and wrested control of most of the island from the natives (59). By

halfway through the sixth century, the south of Britain was firmly under barbarian

domination (60). Except for the British refuges in the more remote parts of the island,

Christianity had been replaced by Germanic pagan culture.

This culture was deeply rooted in the violent warrior traditions of the Continental

barbarians. The political structure of these Germanic bands relied on the concept of the

comitatus recorded by the Roman historian Tacitus. A group of warriors centred around a

warlord, who commanded them in battle and in peacetime. The chief fought to obtain glory

for himself and his men, while his thanes fought out of loyalty to him. This devotion was so

complete that Germanic warrior values held it shameful for thanes to return alive from a

battlefield where their lord had fallen. Without his lord, a thane amounted to nothing in the

Germanic world. In return for this loyalty, the chieftain would reward his thanes with

sustenance and treasure (Godfrey 62). The Wanderer and The Seafarer repeatedly

demonstrate this centrality of the comitatus to Anglo-Saxon culture. The Wanderer recalls

his lack of a place as he „remembers hall-retainers and how in his youth/He had taken

treasure from the hands of his gold-friend/After the feast‟ (Crossley-Holland “Wanderer”

109). The Seafarer, on the other hand, recognises the importance of the comitatus to

temporal society, but also mourns it as a memorial of a more heroic age than his

contemporary culture, for „[k]ings and emperors and gold-giving lords/Are no longer as they

3

used to be —/…those joys have passed away;/Weaklings thrive and hold sway in the world‟

(Crossley-Holland “Seafarer” 119). In order to continue to fulfil these material obligations to

his warriors, an ideal chieftain had to engage in constant warfare and conquest, creating a

very violent society where militaristic principles and values reigned supreme (Godfrey 62).

Thus Anglo-Saxon society was one of nearly unending violence, where military exploits

often became an end in themselves and underpinned the very fabric of social hierarchy and

composition.

This violent culture often meant that Germanic comitati would range far and wide

seeking new conquests and the treasure they promised. The Wanderer and The Seafarer both

exhibit the restless spirit of the Germanic adventurer (whether adventuring from choice or

necessity) that led the ancient ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons to overrun the Western Roman

Empire, that led their fathers to invade Britain, that led their own generations to return to the

Continent in a more peaceful spirit to evangelise their Frisian and Saxon brethren, and that

would lead their Scandinavian relatives to violently prey upon their own shores during the

Viking Era (Godfrey 188). The Wanderer reflects this cultural tradition of voyaging in lines

such as „[s]orrow and care constantly/Attend the man who must send time and again/His

weary heart over the frozen waves‟ (Crossley-Holland “Wanderer” 110). The Seafarer

illustrates this impulse even more explicitly:

Wherefore my heart leaps within me,

My mind roves with the waves

Over the whale‟s domain, it wanders far and wide

Across the face of the earth, returns again to me

Eager and unsatisfied; the solitary bird screams,

Irrestible, urging my heart to the whale‟s way

Over the stretch of the sea. (Crossley-Holland “Seafarer” 118)

4

This ethnic urge to set sail, to roam abroad in search of greener pastures to conquer and

settle, seems to have transformed under the influence of Christianity into a corresponding

spiritual urge for pilgrimage on the high seas.

Little can be said with certainty about the details of English paganism before the

reintroduction of Christianity to the island. The heathen Anglo-Saxon pantheon consisted of

Woden, Thunor, Tiw, and others. While it is tempting to identify the specific attributes of

the better-documented Norse gods with their English counterparts, this approach to filling in

gaps in Anglo-Saxon mythology is ultimately speculative. However, Woden, an aristocratic

war-god from whom Germanic chieftains claimed ancestry, does bear close similarity to the

Norse Odin, just as Thunor, the thunder-god, does to his Scandinavian double, Thor. In

Tacitus‟ descriptions of Continental Germanic worship, the Roman historian identifies

Woden with Mercury, Thunor with Jupiter (despite his cult‟s being smaller than that of

Woden), and the lesser war-god Tiw with Mars. But the fact remains that little is known

about the particulars of fifth- and sixth-century Anglo-Saxon religion beyond its linguistic

influence on place-names and days of the week and its calendar of religious holidays, such as

Yule (Godfrey 63). Regardless of the limitations of modern knowledge about English

paganism, its practice among the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms was universal.

However universal, the depth of pagan piety in Anglo-Saxon culture is unclear. The

number of English sites whose names incorporate pagan elements seems to be highest in

areas where the Venerable Bede records resistance to Christianity as being the greatest

(Godfrey 64). But the faith of the Anglo-Saxons seems to have been less fervent than that of

their continental forbears encountered by Tacitus. Priests, temples, and shrines still existed

throughout Germanic Britain. While human sacrifices had gone out of style, livestock were

5

still ritually offered to the deities, though their cults held less conviction than they did on the

Continent. Although the Christian church of the Romano-Britons had almost certainly

ceased to exist outside of the parts of the island still controlled by the Celtic natives, the

conversion of England to Christianity occurred with exceptional ease, especially in

comparison to the Anglo-Saxons‟ Continental kinsmen, the Frisians and Saxons, who would

later stubbornly resist the efforts of Christian missionaries. In England, only the Kingdom of

Essex manifested any strong fidelity to its ancestral paganism. This general acquiescence to

the advent of Christianity in England may be the result of the survival of a large proportion

of Britons under their Germanic conquerors, who readily returned to the religion of their

fathers, but it also seems to indicate a cooling of pagan zeal in the migration and settlement

of England by the Anglo-Saxons. Instead of strong organised pagan institutions, superstition

seemed to hold more importance in Anglo-Saxon society, as belief in charms, dragons,

spells, elves, and natural sites strongly associated with spiritual potency would survive even

the triumph of Christianity in England (65). Despite these instances of folk spiritualism,

however, the increasingly empty ritual paganism of the Land of the Angles seemed to leave a

spiritual vacuum waiting to be filled by the vibrancy of the energetically expanding Christian

religion.

The story of the initial impetus for the Christianisation of England is well known. A

chance meeting between Pope Saint Gregory the Great and a young Angle slave in the

marketplace brought that far outpost of Europe back into the concerns of Rome nearly two

hundred years after the withdrawal of the Empire‟s legions (Godfrey 68). Gregory‟s interest

thus sparked, he began to work tirelessly to convert England to the Christian faith, a

campaign that would serve as one of the defining missions of his papacy, though he would

6

never visit the island himself (67). Instead, that role would fall to Saint Augustine, soon to

be of Canterbury, the prior of the monastery Gregory had founded at his family estate on the

Caelian Hill in Rome (68, 72). Despite a temporary setback due to the reluctance and failing

courage of the monks of Augustine‟s mission, the Romans headed north—aided by clerical

and secular leaders across Gaul—to win these insular heathens for Christ (72-3). The events

had been set in motion to bring the English people within the fold of Christian Europe.

Augustine‟s mission was to the Jutish kingdom of Kent, the closest of the Anglo-

Saxon principalities to the Continent and also the most civilised of the English territories of

the late sixth century (Godfrey 59-60). Furthermore, the Kentish King Æthelbert had

married a Christian woman named Bertha. Although Gregory‟s letters imply that her

religious influence on her husband was minimal, she had brought a Frankish bishop to

Britain with her and may have been quietly modelling Christian piety for Æthelbert for years,

preparing him for eventual conversion through exposure to Masses and other Christian

practices. Whatever the case, she seems to have paved the way for a warm welcome for the

Roman missionaries, who were greeted by the king and given lodging and a place of worship

in the Kentish capital. They began earning converts immediately on the merit of their

preaching and example of simplicity, and Æthelbert himself was baptised before long. With

his conversion, his thanes soon followed suit, if only as an expression of the comitatus ideal.

The rest of the kingdom also quickly embraced the new faith. After the death of Augustine

(whose mission was concerned solely with Kent), this successful policy became the model

for the conversion of the rest of England, as missionaries would first approach the ruler of

each kingdom, appealing to the centre of secular power and thus ensuring the spiritual

capitulation of the rest of the population (75-7, 91). With the Christianisation of Kent,

7

Gregory and Augustine had established a firm Christian beachhead in England, the

importance of which can still be seen today in the importance of the archbishopric of

Canterbury in the Church of England. Their accomplishment would set the stage for the

relatively painless conversion of the rest of the island.

The merging of Christian doctrine with the Anglo-Saxon warrior tradition that

resulted from the Conversion of England created a unique literary expression in pre-Norman

society. The model established by Gregory and Augustine in the early days of the conversion

was a blending of elements of different cultures to build a new Christian form that would

facilitate the acceptance of the new religion. In what appears to be a demonstration of

originality and initiative, Augustine rededicated a pagan temple to create the Christian church

of Saint Pancras, a practice encouraged by Gregory (Godfrey 78). Gregory further instructed

him, in developing a liturgy for the English Church, to blend the traditions and rituals of the

Roman, Gallic, or other Christian traditions to create the best possible Mass, capitalising on,

rather than bemoaning, the lack of any English Christian tradition (82-3). These examples of

cultural tolerance probably helped advance the work of the missionaries in England and

certainly led to the creation of a distinct flavour in early English Christianity.

This is especially true in the development of Anglo-Saxon poetry. Poetry was of

supreme importance to Anglo-Saxon society, and in 747 the Church had to make a specific

prohibition on clergymen to prevent them from delivering their sermons in the style of

dramatic secular poets (Godfrey 186). But despite the barring of poetry from the Mass, the

Mass could not be kept from poetry. The violent values of the thane ideal competed and

finally blended with the Christian story of a self-sacrificing god, as in the Old English poem,

The Dream of the Rood, from the Vercelli Book manuscript (193-4). The surviving corpus of

8

Anglo-Saxon poetry, most of which dates from before the Danish Conquest, demonstrates a

gradual evolution from heathen values to a central grounding in Christian doctrine.

However, this transition does not take place in clearly discernible and distillable stages, as

the controversy over the fundamentally pagan or Christian origin of Beowulf demonstrates1

(186-7). Even Biblical mythology and patristic ecclesiastical history are recast in distinctly

Anglo-Saxon tones, as in the poem Genesis B, where the depiction of Lucifer is clearly in the

terms of a haughty thane who oversteps his social position, rebels against his lord, and

betrays his comitatus before descending to Hell, where he gathers his own band of other

fallen angels, appealing to their Germanic sense of loyalty by recalling all the treasure he

procured for them before their fall (189). On the other side of the spiritual spectrum, the

character of the apostle Saint Andrew in Andreas is that of the stock seafarer who achieves

far-reaching conquests for Jesus Christ, his chieftain (188). The characters of Christ, Satan,

and the saints have all been culturally appropriated and reassigned as members of the

Germanic social hierarchy, thus making the dogmatic messages related through their stories

relevant to an Anglo-Saxon audience.

Within this body of Old English literature, several poems have been traditionally

classified as „elegies‟ by modern scholars. The Wanderer and The Seafarer both fall within

this classification of several poems from the Exeter Book manuscript (Klinck 12). The

appellation of „elegy‟ is largely anachronistic, as no contemporary critical commentaries on

these works exists, much less a discussion which groups these poems and others together in a

specific genre (223). In addition to inhabiting a specific metre (11), classical Greco-Roman

elegies were characterised by ancient commentators as laments, although no surviving

1 For more on this subject, see F.A. Blackburn‟s “The Christian Coloring of the Beowulf” and Larry D.

Benson‟s reponse, “The Pagan Coloring of Beowulf”.

9

examples of the genre actually embody any passionate mournful quality as their primary

quality. Instead, they more often seem to foreshadow the later „elegies‟ of the northern

barbarians in their emotionally subdued contemplation of the mortal condition and revelation

of gnomic wisdom as a form of consolation for loss, imbuing the idea of the elegiac lament

with a marked difference in connotation from the dirge model (Harvey 170-1). Hundreds of

years later, the modern English pastoral elegies of Milton and Shelley focused on capturing

the spirit of the eclogue or idyll in their discussions of the loss of a friend (Klinck 11). These

examples of elegiac lyrics from other contexts demonstrate different definitions and

connotations of „elegy‟ in varied cultures and times, but also point to a consistent common

theme of loss and subsequent reflection that is also found in The Wanderer and The Seafarer.

The Old English elegies share more than simply linguistic blood with these later

elegies, as they also deal with the themes of loss and mortality. However, the Anglo-Saxons

take a contemplative approach to these ideas more in common with that of the ancient Greeks

and Romans. The Anglo-Saxon poets also have an eye toward the universal application of

the newfound wisdom gained from some personal experience (Klinck 11). The scholar

Stanley B. Greenfield defines the Anglo-Saxon elegy as „a relatively short reflective or

dramatic poem embodying a contrasting pattern of loss and consolation, ostensibly based

upon a specific personal experience or observation, and expressing an attitude towards that

experience‟ (qtd. in Klinck 11). This definition is a useful one for this study of The

Wanderer and The Seafarer, particularly as it pertains to the speakers‟ reactions to their

„specific personal experience[s]‟. The Wanderer and The Seafarer also include meditations

on other common elegiac themes such as exile, descriptions of wasteland, the loss of

companions, and the ephemeral nature of earthly joys. It is a common feature of Old English

10

elegiac poetry to relate these ruminations in the form of a monologue that begins with a

personal introduction and often concludes with a revelation of deep wisdom or a spiritual

lesson (Klinck 11). All of these thematic explorations are portrayed within a conventional

literary context that makes their message instantly recognisable to a contemporary audience.

The single most important sentiment communicated through the Old English elegy is

that of separation, the gap between the subject and the object of his desire. In The Wanderer

and The Seafarer, this contrast is between the temporal and spiritual world; the spiritual

world represents a haven better than the comforts offered by the temporal and a recompense

for the disappointments one may suffer there (Klinck 225). The solution to the bereavement

of the characters in these poems is an explicitly religious one: this life may have its troubles,

but they are—like all other things in this world—temporal. The life to come holds far better

eternal joys for those who earn them. Both poems demonstrate this belief by elaborating on

the deprivations and difficulties of the speaker‟s current plight before contrasting it with the

hopeful expectation of the rewards of the life to come. Thus these elegies are framed in

explicitly and intrinsically Christian terms, produced by the Christian society of Anglo-Saxon

England. They do not necessarily display sophisticated elements of Christian theology, but

they do employ a practical understanding of Christian doctrine about the connection and

contrast between this life and the next and its relevance to the problem of loneliness and

alienation in contemporary society (231-2). Some of the language in The Wanderer and The

Seafarer, particularly the ubi sunt passages, recalls the language used by preachers in

contemporary homilies (233). In this way, the poems favourably contrast the ascetic life and

ultimate eternal reward of Christianity against the ephemeral temporal trappings of Germanic

11

(and ancestrally pagan) culture while using traditional Germanic vernacular poetry to express

this message.

The Wanderer, the first of these two Exeter Book poems, portrays at its outset a man

torn between his affections for the passing things of the temporal world and the promises of

the spiritual world to come. The narrator of the poem, the Wanderer himself, inhabits a

specific context within Anglo-Saxon society as a wandering exile, a thane without a lord. He

is „[c]ut off from free kinsmen, so far away/From [his] own dear country‟ (Crossley-Holland

“Wanderer” 109). The famous ubi sunt passage (paraphrased and popularised by Anglo-

Saxon professor J.R.R. Tolkien in his novel The Lord of the Rings) begins with the Wanderer

gazing upon the ruins of his old hall and crying out:

Where has the horse gone? Where the man? Where the giver of gold?

Where is the feasting place? And where the pleasures of the hall?

I mourn the gleaming cup, the warrior in his corselet,

The glory of the prince. How time has passed away,

Darkened under the shadow of night even as if it had never been. (111)

In Anglo-Saxon society, the loss of one‟s lord and comitatus held much more serious

consequences than mere unemployment. The Old English scholar Anne L. Klinck describes

the deeper implications that such a loss would entail:

In the close-knit tribal society depicted by Old English poetry, separation from

the person or persons to whom one belongs deprives [one] not only of

companionship but of one‟s entire function in the world. One‟s lord…and

friends, that is, „loved ones,‟ „kin,‟ provide an enveloping security. Thus, the

sense of separation which in a modern setting might arise from a multiplicity

of situations characteristically takes the form of exile. (225-6)

A thane without his lord and comitatus was a man outside of the normal social systems of

Anglo-Saxon culture, a pariah beyond the pale, even if modern sympathies would judge his

circumstances to be outside of his control. His place was beside his chief and comrades,

whether dead or alive, as the heroic thane Byrhtwold exemplifies and exhorts in The Battle of

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Maldon. In that poem, he urges his fellow retainers to stand firm, despite the death of their

leader Byrhtnoth:

„Mind must be the firmer, heart the more fierce,

Courage the greater, as our strength diminishes.

Here lies our leader, dead,

An heroic man in the dust.

He who now longs to escape will lament for ever.

I am old. I will not go from here,

But I mean to lie by the side of my lord,

Lie in the dust with the man I loved so dearly.‟ (Crossley-Holland “Maldon”

38)

In the ideals of literature at least, if not also in the real experience of Anglo-Saxon thanes,

any man who did not live up to Byrhtwold‟s creed was doomed to a live a life apart from

community, a lonely outcast in a hostile world.

This institution of exilic wandering was one of several features of pagan Anglo-Saxon

society that survived the Conversion, though its significance was transformed by the advent

of Christianity. In The Wanderer, it is first presented in primarily physical (and, by

extension, pagan) terms as the speaker copes with his miserable station. Due to the centrality

of the comitatus to the life of the Anglo-Saxon thane, the loss of that essential society leaves

him alone in and alienated from his native culture. But the violence of that very culture also

ensured that the Wanderer is not unique in his predicament. In fact, the Wanderer fulfils an

archetypal role within Old English literature: that of the exiled thane, bereft of kith or kin by

the continual feuding violence of Germanic society. The use of the concept of wyrd, often

translated as „fate‟ or „destiny‟ stresses that the Wanderer‟s circumstances are beyond his

control, and thus he believes himself—at least initially—to be at the mercy of impersonal and

arbitrary determinism. Furthermore, wyrd is an originally pagan concept, and its importance

in the early part of the poem stresses the Wanderer‟s attachment to the old, temporal world of

13

Germanic values even in his physical separation from that world. Even more importantly,

the Anglo-Saxon word translated as „wanderer‟ in the poem, anhaga, carries strong

conventional associations with excommunication or a forced separation from society (Bjork

120-1). Beyond the connotations of the word choice, the content of the introduction to the

poem further highlights the involuntary nature of the speaker‟s seclusion:

The lonely wanderer prays often for compassion

And for mercy from Lord God; but for a long time

Destiny decrees that with a heavy heart he must dip

His oars into icy waters, working his passage over the sea.

He must follow the paths of exile. Fate is inexorable! (Crossley-Holland

“Wanderer” 108)

The Wanderer‟s separation from civilization is truly an exile, imposed upon him by the

customs of Germanic culture, in the form of both the destructive feuds that robbed him of his

community and the social expectations that consign him to remain in isolation.

At first, the Wanderer attempts to normalise his situation by traditional means. To

rectify his loss of temporal purpose and security, the Wanderer sets out into the wilds in a

quest to find a replacement community:

Hunting for the hall of a generous gold-giver….

For a man who would welcome me into his mead-hall,

Give me good cheer, (for I boasted no friends)

Entertain me with delights. (Crossley-Holland “Wanderer” 109)

However, despite his search, the Wanderer finds only more misery. He attributes this to the

common lot of the anhaga. A man in his position cannot be satisfied in this world, and

instead will find only „the ways of exile‟, „dark waves‟, a „restless sleep‟ filled with painful

memories of unrecoverable happiness, and „[s]now flakes falling mingled with hail‟ (109).

His attachment to the social necessities of the secular Anglo-Saxon lifestyle torture him with

visions of „[h]is comrade warriors‟ that only „melt away again./Their spirits do not bring

14

many old songs/To his lips‟ (110). The Wanderer‟s quest for physical rather than

metaphysical comfort consistently leaves him frustrated. The Wanderer realises that the

solution to his desperate search for meaning cannot be found in the traditional pagan values.

This realisation, however, is only half the battle. If relief cannot be found in a return

to the foundations of Germanic society, one hopes it may be had elsewhere. But so far, the

Wanderer has not provided any positive solution, only negative recognition. Some critics

claim that the poem never intended to provide any sort of solid answer, but was simply a

meditation on the ephemeral nature of the world, a more purely „elegiac‟ composition

mourning the passing of all things. According to this theory, later Christian interpolations

gave it a religious message (see also the debate about Beowulf mentioned above) and oriented

it toward ascetic hopes for the afterlife primarily through the addition of the introduction and

conclusion (Crossley-Holland “Wanderer” 106). This theory is reinforced by the strange

absence of any reference to Christ in His role as Redeemer and the emphasis on God as a

distant and supremely powerful figure in The Wanderer (this curiousity is also evident in The

Seafarer). Some scholars attribute this disparity to the infancy of Christian influence among

deep-rooted pagan theological frameworks. But a Christian poem composed in a recently

converted population would be expected to stress fundamental points of orthodox doctrine

for this very reason, and other passages in the poem echo language used in relatively

sophisticated Christian homilies, further arguing against the „infant Christian‟ poet

hypothesis (Gordon 12). Thus, the argument goes, the poet intended not to provide answers

to the issue of loss and isolation in Anglo-Saxon society, but rather to comfort the reader by

assuring him that the things he longed for were doomed to fade away. Therefore, he must

15

come to terms with this fact and bear his pain stoically. This idea is not implausible, but it is

ultimately unsatisfying.

Instead, it seems much more likely that the poem is intentionally Christian, an

adaptation of the values of the ascetic life to the Germanic cultural model, just as had been

accomplished with The Dream of the Rood. Despite the argument for pagan composition, a

closer inspection of the text reveals that the references to Christian values are not as

superficial or fleeting as one might suppose at first glance. The absence of Christ as

Redeemer simply reflects the rhetorical intent of the poem, which focuses on the qualities

now classified as „elegiac.‟ Christ‟s agency has little poetic place in the Old English elegy,

as the traditional and originally pagan form concentrates on the individual‟s own response to

intense pain and loss. The Christian ideas employed within this form cannot be allowed to

interfere with the fundamental subject matter of the elegy (Gordon 12-3). Furthermore, the

use of language associated with pagan texts does not necessarily denote pagan ideas. Often

old linguistic forms and phrases survive long after their relevance to contemporary belief

systems has expired, particularly in poetic expression, where they remain for the rhetorical

force they may lend the composition (4-5). Many elements of the poem seem common to

both pagan and Christian traditions, such as the references to the „ways of death‟:

The wine-halls crumble, heartbroken lords

Lie dead, all the proud followers

Have fallen by the wall. Battle laid claim to some,

Leading them on long journeys; the raven carried one

High over the waters, and one the grey wolf

Devoured; a warrior with a downcast face

Hid yet another in an earth-cave. (Crossley-Holland “Wanderer” 110)

These images reflect traditional Germanic poetic conventions of beasts-of-battle feasting on

the carnage wrought by human combat, but also parallels contemporary Christian prose

16

homilies, particularly those relating to the doctrine of the resurrection (Klinck 122-3, 233).

Other connections are more exclusively Christian. Klinck, who firmly believes that all the

Old English elegies are the product of an already Christianised society, notes an echo of Saint

Augustine‟s idea of the trinity of the soul in the Wanderer‟s use of memory, intelligence, and

will throughout his spiritual enlightenment in the poem. In De Trinitate, the Church Father

describes the recounting of one‟s own suffering, the recognition and understanding of the

world‟s ephemeral nature, and the subsequent reliance on God for stability as a mirror of the

divine Trinity itself, the image of God in man. Saint Augustine believes that this trinitarian

capacity of the soul can lead one to spiritual enlightenment as he uses it to approach the

Godhead. None of the language in The Wanderer reflects that used by Saint Augustine in

describing this concept, but the speaker‟s journey toward inner peace despite physical

deprivation and hardship follows the saint‟s model perfectly (34, 231, 233). The theme of

exile in the early part of the poem is also strongly suggestive of the ejection of man from

Eden after the Fall, only again imbued with a distinctively Germanic context through

vocabulary and style (232-3). While these connections may not be obviously theological,

they still bear the underlying mark of a Christian context in their composition.

However, perhaps the most important signifier of Christian purpose in The Wanderer

is the ultimate note of hope (however muted by mournful imagery) found in the latter half of

the poem. Ironically, the trigger for this hope lies in the turn in the first two lines of the

passage that introduces the extremely dark „ways of death‟ and ubi sunt discourses:

And thus I cannot understand why in the world

My mind is not tormented

When I brood on the fate of many brave warriors,

How they have suddenly had to leave the mead-hall,

The bold friends and followers. (Crossley-Holland “Wanderer” 110)

17

Here, just before he recounts in graphic detail the deaths of his fellow warriors and the decay

of the buildings which he once called home, the Wanderer finds a mental peace that has thus

far evaded him. Whence does it come? It seems difficult to accept that all his previous

mental anguish has been swept away by some gnomic recognition of the temporality of all

things. Surely this realisation had already been instilled in him by the loss of his comitatus.

Instead, the Wanderer has tempered this realisation with the discovery of the world to come,

a promise of a life that is not ephemeral.

This discovery revolutionises the Wanderer‟s perspective not only on his own

situation, but also on the importance of the entire societal construct in which he was raised.

At the end of the poem, the Wanderer himself, who was at the outset abandoned and

involuntarily cut off from his community, abandons the values of that community, rejecting

even the condition of exile. The feuding violence is futile and destructive, the material

wealth and social community are fleeting, and even fame does not last, as the poet

demonstrates in the ubi sunt passage. Thus the Wanderer, in a moment of proto-

existentialism, rejects even the exile that has been imposed upon him by his bankrupt society

(Bjork 126). At the end of the poem, he still recognises that „[n]othing is ever easy in the

kingdom of earth,/The world beneath the heavens is in the hands of fate‟ (Crossley-Holland

“Wanderer” 111), a conclusion that bears similarities to the Christian belief that a power

other than God holds immediate dominion over the earth. Orthodox Christianity attributes

this tyranny to Satan, a malevolent force, rather than an impartial one such as the wyrd of The

Wanderer, but the parallel remains. But instead of despairing at the world‟s decay and

difficulty, he resolves to „seek/Comfort and compassion from the Father in Heaven where we

will all find security‟ (111). Rather than remain a miserable outcast, the Wanderer becomes

18

a voluntary Christian ascetic, chasing after the things of the next world rather than clinging to

the passing things of this present life. Leaving the desires for the warrior community with its

gold rings and mead-halls behind, the Wanderer sets out to store up treasures in Heaven.

The emerging ideas of Christian asceticism in The Wanderer are brought to their

maturity in The Seafarer. The Seafarer follows The Wanderer in the Exeter Book. They are

separated by two other poems, but the similarities of content between the two poems means

that they are often discussed in relation to each other (Crossley-Holland “Seafarer” 114).

The Wanderer reaches his moment of enlightenment while alone on the sea (Crossley-

Holland “Wanderer” 108), and The Seafarer picks up where his meditation left off, both

physically and spiritually. The process of enlightenment completed in The Wanderer is taken

for granted in The Seafarer, as the speaker delivers the entire poem from the point of view of

a voluntary ascetic. There is still a hint of attachment to the old traditional world of which

the Wanderer has been deprived, as the Seafarer seems to mourn the passing of „[k]ings and

emperors and gold-giving lords‟ and their replacement by contemporary „weaklings‟.

However, while this dirge seems to point to the Seafarer‟s longing for a faded golden age, he

is also quick to add that „[s]uch excellence proved ephemeral‟ (Crossley-Holland “Seafarer”

119). Indeed, this is the only passage in the entire poem that seems to echo the deep sense of

loss in the first half of The Wanderer. Instead the Seafarer, as a sort of literary heir to the

character of the Wanderer, remembers his secular past with some fondness, but has a much

deeper attachment to his new life of spiritual contemplation on the seas.

The literary ideal of the Seafarer as a Christian ascetic dedicated to pursuing a

hermetic life on the ocean is not without historical precedent. Early Irish law sometimes

sentenced accidental criminals to a solitary existence adrift in a small boat. This idea was

19

soon picked up among Celtic Christian ascetics as a form of penitential pilgrimage. While

these penitents were not necessarily criminals, the sea-voyage became a form of atonement

for sins among the particularly ascetically-minded. In 891, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells

of „[t]hree Irishmen [who] came to King Alfred in a boat without oars, having stolen away

from Ireland for the love of God to go on pilgrimage, they cared not where. The boat was

made of two-and-a-half-hides and they took with them sufficient that they might have food

for seven nights; and they came to land in Cornwall after seven nights‟ (qtd. in “Pilgrims &

Pilgrimage”). These men did not set out on pilgrimage as we may understand it today, in the

form of an intentional journey toward a specific holy site. Instead, they set off, without

means of directing their course, physically aimless but spiritually pursuing contemplative

enlightenment. They were pilgrims without a destination, pilgrims for the love of God,

peregrini pro amore Dei (Marsden 221). This tradition did not remain limited to Ireland, but

also found a home in English practices of extreme devotion through intercourse such as

described in the Chronicle; it is said that Saint Elgar of Bardsey exiled himself for

unwillingly participating in an execution (“Pilgrims & Pilgrimage). Indeed, some scholars

say that the Wanderer and the Seafarer are literary types drawn directly from Celtic traditions

replanted in Germanic soil (Gordon 2). Thus the Wanderer fits into this pattern as a man

drifting about in search of meaning after a terrible disaster, but it is not until his recognition

of the deeper spiritual truths about the temporal and eternal worlds that he achieves the status

of a true wandering pilgrim. These ideas are more central to the speaker of The Seafarer,

who has already internalised them, and thus he even more perfectly models the concept of a

peregrinus pro amore Dei.

20

According to the ideals of early Christian spiritual asceticism, the Seafarer has

reached a maturity that is only starting to dawn in the character of the Wanderer. Though

similar debate exists about the originally pagan or Christian authorship of the poem

(Crossley-Holland “Seafarer” 114), The Seafarer contains much more intrinsic and explicit

references to Christian doctrines concerning divine judgment and the afterlife (118-9). More

importantly, the speaker‟s approach toward secular pursuits is less mournful than that of the

Wanderer. Certainly, the Seafarer dwells at length in the early passages of the poem on the

contrast between his own miserable condition on the high seas where „[i]cicles hung round

me; hail showers flew‟ and the easy and pleasurable lifestyle within an urban community

where men are „proud and flushed with wine‟ (117). However, the contrast is decidedly

couched in terms of Saint Augustine‟s theological concept of the „two cities‟ found in De

Ciuitate Dei. The first is the city of man, corrupt and fallen, the second the eponymous city

of God, filled with righteous Christians striving for the things of eternal significance

(Marsden 221). The Seafarer has irrevocably and voluntarily broken away from his society.

He has found „that the joys/Of the Lord inspire me more than this dead life,/Ephemeral here

on earth. I have no faith/That the splendours of this earth will survive for ever‟ (Crossley-

Holland “Seafarer” 118). On the other hand, he observes:

Though a brother may bury his kinsman

Amongst the dead, strew his grave with gold

And the many treasures he wished to take with him,

The shining gold which a man stores on earth

Is of no assistance to his sinful soul

Confronted at the last by God‟s wrath. (119)

As a result, the Seafarer‟s „heart‟s longings always urge me /To undertake a journey, to visit

the country/Of a foreign people far across the sea‟ (117). These impulses are universal

representations of human spiritual yearning, but also hold personal significance for the

21

character of the Seafarer (Klinck 231). His desire to visit strange cultures may be simply a

recognition that he, like the Irish peregrini mentioned above, will eventually, by the grace of

God, make landfall somewhere, or it could refer to a more specific place pilgrimage (though

the lack of further references in the poem to a destination make this unlikely). It may even

be a reference to missionary activity among the still-pagan Germanic tribes of the Continent.

Whatever the purpose of his journey, the poem emphasises that it is the journey itself which

is important, and that journey is a solitary one without creature comforts.

This voluntary solitude separates the Seafarer from his society even more than exile

separates the Wanderer from his. In a culture defined by the communal interaction of the

comitatus, the Seafarer willingly chooses to move outside the system, replacing his temporal

lord with the Almighty and substituting collective military service with individual spiritual

pursuit. He recognises that all „his former friends,/The sons of princes, have been placed in

the earth‟ (Crossley-Holland “Seafarer” 119), and thus resolves to serve only the eternal

Lord, however daunting such service may be:

On earth there is no man so self-assured,

So generous with his gifts or so gallant in his youth,

So daring in his deeds or with such a gracious lord,

That he harbours no fears about his seafaring

As to what Almighty God will ordain for him. (117-8)

Within this single sentence, the Seafarer accomplishes several rhetorical aims. First, he

establishes the peregrinato lifestyle as harder, and thus more virtuous, than the wealthy and

violent careers of lords and thanes. Second, he details the aspects of the communal secular

life which he has abandoned to pursue the simple but painful voyage in quest for spiritual

enlightenment. Finally, the Seafarer establishes himself as a lone operator, one of the few

who possess the courage to pursue the honestly ascetic life. This further removes him from

22

the community of the comitatus, for, like the Wanderer, he does not replace the community

to which he no longer belongs. Thus the Seafarer‟s lonely sea pilgrimage marks a shift from

the group-culture of the comitatus society, where responsibility is shared among the thanes

who collectively serve their lord primarily through external displays of valour, to the

individual guilt culture of Christianity, which demands personal accountability for behaviour,

both external and internal, and primarily values moral intentions that then translate into

virtuous action. Viewed in this light, the Seafarer becomes a truly revolutionary figure in

literature, overturning the expectations of his traditional society and replacing them with

wholly different standards of conduct.

However, this spiritual revolution is not entirely altruistic. The self-interest of the

thane survives. In the comitatus, the thane would expect to be rewarded for his service with

treasure gained by his lord in conquest. Likewise, the Seafarer believes that „the humble

man…will find mercy in Heaven‟ (Crossley-Holland “Seafarer” 119). This life may have

joys on which one may miss out, but the next life is far better in its eternal rapture and

achievement. However, there remains a strong connection between one‟s performance in this

life and the rewards of the next. Trials must be suffered, endured, and conquered. The joys

of eternity may only be obtained through ascetic denial in this life. The Seafarer must allow

his feet to be „tortured by frost, fettered/In frozen chains‟ while „fierce anguish clutche[s]/At

[his] heart‟ and „passionate longings [madden]/The mind of the sea-weary man‟ (Crossley-

Holland “Seafarer” 117), just as a thane must risk his life in battle and prove himself at

martial skill. The thane who performs well will receive gold and treasure, and he who truly

excels will achieve everlasting fame that will ensure that his name survives long after his

23

mortal remains have mouldered in the grave. The Seafarer believes that the rewards of pious

asceticism are even more valuable:

The best of posthumous fame

Is to achieve great deeds on earth

Against the malice of the fiends, against the devil,

So that the children of men may honour a man‟s name

And his fame at last may live with the angels

For ever and ever, in the joy of life eternal

Amongst the heavenly host. (119)

While the secular warrior will have stories told of his exploits for generations to come, the

saintly pereginus will enjoy not only that honour, but the joy of eternal life to revel in his

heavenly achievements. God rewards his servants better than any earthly lord can

compensate his thanes, and so the Seafarer quite naturally goes where the pay is the best and

most deserving of loyalty. This is not to put too cynical an edge on the Seafarer‟s devotion,

it is simply to place it within its proper cultural context, informed as it is by the customs of

the comitatus. The relationship between lord and thane is very much a transaction of loyalty

and martial service for material riches and a chance at everlasting glory. The Seafarer has

simply chosen to give his loyalty to the lord who is not only most deserving of it, but who is

also best able to reward it. As he has already established, the Seafarer believes his ascetic

calling is both worthier and harder than that of the secular thane. Thus, it deserves greater

reward: the promise of eternal life and truly everlasting fame. As a result, no earthly lord

could possibly deserve the service of the Seafarer, as only God is worthy of such service and

only God may repay it in kind. In highlighting this transference, the poet skilfully co-opts

traditional Germanic warrior values for the purpose of championing Christian asceticism.

The Seafarer remains a product of his Germanic society, but one who has transferred his

allegiance from temporal concerns to eternal ones.

24

Thus the Seafarer‟s meditations complete the evolution over the course of the two

poems from the troubled traditions of pagan Anglo-Saxon society to the difficult but

eternally rewarding expressions of Christian piety. Through the vehicle of peregrinato pro

amore Dei, the Wanderer embraces Christian ascetic values and achieves inner peace, a

peace on which the Seafarer builds to create a mature reorientation of the thane ideal toward

Christian models. While these poems fall within the loose modern classification of elegy, the

ostensible object of their mourning is ultimately found to be unworthy of pursuit, and by the

end, each is found to be longing not for the restoration of earthly glories and comforts but for

the Kingdom of Heaven itself. Ultimately, The Wanderer and The Seafarer may be best

understood as complementary and sensitive expressions of the evolving spiritual maturity of

the individual as he abandons the attractive cares of the ephemeral world for the hardships of

the journeying life, constantly questing for the Christian afterlife and storing up treasures in

Heaven.

25

Works Cited

Bjork, R.E. “Sundor æt rune: the voluntary exile of the Wanderer”. Neophilologus 73.1

(1989): 119-29.

Crossley-Holland, Kevin, trans. “The Battle of Maldon”. The Battle of Maldon and Other

Old English Poems. Ed. Bruce Mitchell. London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1965. 27-

38.

---. “The Seafarer”. The Battle of Maldon and Other Old English Poems. Ed. Bruce Mitchell.

London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1965. 113-9.

---. “The Wanderer”. The Battle of Maldon and Other Old English Poems. Ed. Bruce

Mitchell. London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1965. 105-11.

Godfrey, John. The Church in Anglo-Saxon England. London: University of Cambridge

Press, 1962.

Gordon, I.L. “Traditional Themes in „The Wanderer‟ and „The Seafarer‟”. The Review of

English Studies 5.17 (1954):1-13.

Harvey, A.E. “The Classification of Greek Lyric Poetry”. The Classical Quarterly 5.3-4

(1955): 157-75.

Klinck, Anne L. The Old English Elegies: A Critical Edition and Genre Study. Ithaca, NY:

McGill-Queen‟s University Press, 1992.

Marsden, Richard. The Cambridge Old English Reader. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2004.

“Pilgrims & Pilgrimage: Journey, Spirituality & Daily Life through the Centuries Interactive

CD-ROM”. Christianity and Culture. Nottingham: University of York and St. John‟s

University, Nottingham.

26

Works Consulted

Atherton, Mark. Teach Yourself Old English. Reading, England: McGraw-Hill, 2006.

Blair, John. The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Bjork, R.E. “Sundor æt rune: the voluntary exile of the Wanderer”. Neophilologus 73.1

(1989): 119-29.

Cook, P. “Woriað þa winsalo: The Bonds of Exile in „The Wanderer‟”. Neophilologus 80.1

(1996): 127-37.

Crossley-Holland, Kevin, trans. “The Battle of Maldon”. The Battle of Maldon and Other

Old English Poems. Ed. Bruce Mitchell. London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1965. 27-

38.

---. “The Seafarer”. The Battle of Maldon and Other Old English Poems. Ed. Bruce Mitchell.

London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1965. 113-9.

---. “The Wanderer”. The Battle of Maldon and Other Old English Poems. Ed. Bruce

Mitchell. London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1965. 105-11.

Godfrey, John. The Church in Anglo-Saxon England. London: University of Cambridge

Press, 1962.

Gordon, I.L. “Traditional Themes in „The Wanderer‟ and „The Seafarer‟”. The Review of

English Studies 5.17 (1954):1-13.

Harvey, A.E. “The Classification of Greek Lyric Poetry”. The Classical Quarterly 5.3-4

(1955): 157-75.

Howard, Donald R. Writers and Pilgrims: Medieval Pilgrimage Narratives and Their

Posterity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.

Klinck, Anne L. The Old English Elegies: A Critical Edition and Genre Study. Ithaca, NY:

McGill-Queen‟s University Press, 1992.

Marsden, Richard. The Cambridge Old English Reader. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2004.

McPherson, Clair. “The Sea a Desert: Early English Spirituality and „The Seafarer‟”. The

American Benedictine Review 38.2 (1987): 115-26.

Pilch, Herbert. “The Elegiac Genre in Old English and Early Welsh Poetry”. Zeitschrift für

Celtische Philologie 29.3-4 (1964): 209-24.

27

“Pilgrims & Pilgrimage: Journey, Spirituality & Daily Life through the Centuries Interactive

CD-ROM”. Christianity and Culture. Nottingham: University of York and St. John‟s

University, Nottingham.