The Wanderer

Although I'm a week late, I thought it would be interesting to go back and look at The Wanderer. This poem had a lonely, almost haunting quality to it and it deserves a closer examination. In class, Doug asked us to pin down exactly who the wanderer was. From reading the poem, we can glean that the speaker is alone, has lost his lord, his homeland, and even his happiness. Rather than simply stating that this character is just a regular guy going through a tough time, I think it would be interesting to examine the wanderer as not just a person, but a ghost. Yes, a ghost. There are a few snippets in the writing that would lead us to believe that the speaker is no longer living. For example, the wanderer comments that "exile's path awaits him" and that he can experience "no joy of earth". During Anglo-Saxon times, a person would have had to have done something really terrible to be exiled. Even the worst acts, like killing a member of one's kin, did not lead to exile for some of the characters in Beowulf, like Unferth. Instead of striving to figure out the details of his exile, it's more clear to see that this wanderer is exiled from life itself, not necessarily from his group. As a ghost, it's hardly surprising that the wanderer can find no joy in earthly things; the dead aren't expected to do so. The wanderer goes on to reminisce on happier times when he was a warrior. He comments "How that time has gone, vanished beneath night's cover, just as if it never had been!". For a deceased person doomed to perpetually walk the earth, a short life lived would seem to have vanished as quickly as it started.