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.
Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“The Seafarer” by Anonymous (10th century)
Collected in the Exeter Book, this Old English poem echoes the themes of The Wanderer and is most likely the original work of The Wanderer’s compiler. Because of its much later composition, however, the poem, which focuses on a warrior who faces the challenges of the open sea, finds purpose and reassuring hope in his faith in the Christian God.
“The Wanderer” by W. H. Auden (1930)
Drawing on the template of The Wanderer, Auden highlights the Medieval poem’s sense of spiritual isolation and free-floating anxiety. “Doom,” the poem opens, “is dark” (Line 1). The tormented heroic central figure is on a voyage and dreams of the home and family he might never again see.
“The Wanderer” by Seamus Heaney (1977)
A prose poem composed by the Irish Nobelist, the text recounts the story of a promising student of literature who receives a generous scholarship that marks his moment to depart his home and begin his own life of exploration abroad. The poem draws on the Wanderer’s emotional exile-state. It focuses on the unsettling movement out and away into bleak “migrant solitude.”
Further Literary Resources
“The Wanderer: A Study in Human Understanding” by Anna Warrington (2012)
This article investigates how, despite its setting in the Middle Ages, the poem explores very contemporary themes of spiritual loneliness, existential uncertainty, suffering that brings wisdom, and The Psychological Effects of Isolation. The article concludes by using the poem’s Christian frame as an offer of hope.
“The Hero at the Wall in The Wanderer” by John Richardson (1988)
Using the iconic Medieval symbol of the great hero positioned at a threshold moment of transition, this article explores how the poem uses the warrior on the beach as a symbol of the Wanderer’s spiritual dilemma. The article highlights J. R. R. Tolkien’s interest in the poem in shaping his iconic Lord of the Rings trilogy.
“The Wanderer: Theme and Structure” by Bernard Huppé (1943)
Still regarded as a seminal analysis of the poem, this article explores how the poem uses the concept of a narrator/speaker to make the story of the Wanderer itself a cautionary tale. The article reveals how the framing stanzas, added centuries after the poem’s original text, make the poem less an elegy about stoic despair and more a parable about Christian hope.
Listen to Poem
Stephen Clothier’s 2020 recording of The Wanderer, available on YouTube, offers on-screen a contemporary translation while Clothier reads the original Old English text. The recitation itself works the poem’s caesuras and subtle alliterative effects to give the elegiac feeling to the poem, as well as an impactful sense of drama.
Related Titles
By Anonymous
