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The Literal-Figurative Identity of The Wanderer

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

James L. Rosier
James L. Rosier*
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia 4
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Extract

Dominant among the effects of some Old English meditative and elegiac poems is the paradox of simplicity. The premise might be advanced that the source of our wonder at, often mystification about, such poems as The Seafarer, The Wanderer, and The Wife's Lament is the fact that we are too far separated from the poetic consciousness which gave them being. But surely this would be a profitless premise to begin with, especially since our knowledge of Anglo-Saxon culture and society and learning is not uninformed. Yet our approach to these poems seems to be one of continual amazement and puzzlement, as the now numerous published critical, interpretive studies so well attest. And this is what I mean by the paradox: most of these poems are, in their essential statements, simple and direct; their themes of exile and transience, of resoluteness in the face of flux, of sorrow and hardship and deprivation are staple and often expressed in identical terms, such as the recurrent use of gnomic dicta and the catalogue of misfortunes or joys. Likewise, the vocabulary as vocabulary is static and conventional; the limited, insular hoard of commonplace simplices finds extension only in the native habits characteristic of bothpoetic and non-poetic composition, of affixation, derivation (e.g., anga, engu, langoð), and compounding, and the compounds themselves are more frequently than not transparent and, quite apart from their use in context, unexceptional.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 79 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1964 , pp. 366 - 369
Copyright
Copyright © 1964 by The Modern Language Association of America

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References

1 Archaic words as a specialized class of diction in a given poetic tradition tend to run in batches, that is, there is usually a group of the same words which poet after poet uses. Cf., for example, the recurrence of such words as hight, whilom, wanhope, stound, and woode (‘mad‘) in 16th-century pastoral poetry.

2 The mind and its faculties are constantly referred to throughout the poem. Mod itself occurs eight times both as a simplex and in compounds, together with ferhÐ(loca), hordcofa, breostcofa, hyge, gemynd (and the adj., gemyndig), sefa, gehygd, and wita (plus the adj., wis). The verbs which appear are: hycgan, gemunan, geþencan, geondþencan, ongietan, cunnan, and witan. In the 115 lines there are some thirty-five occurrences of these words.

3 J. O. Beaty (in “The Echo-Word in Beowulf ...,” PMLA, xlix, 1934, 365–373) has called attention to this habit, but unfortunately his article contains little more than lists of examples under several inadequately defined categories.

More recently, in an article, “Poetic Language and Old English Metre” (in Early English and Norse Studies, London: Methuen, 1963, pp. 150–171), Randolph Quirk has made an important contribution to our understanding of Anglo-Saxon habits of poetic composition. He seeks to assess the different forces which habitual, 'alliterative collocations,' 'conventional lexical, grammatical, and rhetorical connexions' exert upon the poet, and by so doing to illustrate how words (and, I would add, ideas) ‘interanimate’ each other to produce expected ‘congruities’ and unexpected, ‘incongruous’ associations. Mr. Quirk also reminds us, and quite properly I think, that “while formulaic utterances and habitual collocations are the necessary starting point in the study of the early alliterative poetry, they are only the starting point” (p. 171; italics his).

4 For some tentative examples of associative composition see my article in PMLA, lxxviii (March 1963), 8–14.

5 Notice the similar figure, ari þúfa (‘eagle-hill‘) in the Skírnisml, st. 27: Ara þúfu á skalt ár sitja (De Gamle Eddadigte, af Finnur Jonsson, K⊘benhavn, 1932, p. 78).

6 The construction, feterum sœlan, is striking because sœlan primarily means “to moor up (a ship)”; here it is used figuratively, “to tie up the mind in (or with) fetters,” a figure which may aptly be related to the reference to hrimcealde sœ in line 4.

7 Of interest here are several other OE compounds formed on -cofa and -loca: -cofa =heolstor-, morþor-, nyd-, and þeoster-; -loca=heolstor-, niþ-, and peoster-.

8 Swimman is one of several verbs of motion in the poem, such as hreosan, (ge)dreosan, feallan, brœdan, geondhweorfan, gesweorcan, and (ge)nipan. The movement denoted or suggested by some of these verbs may be said to sustain, at least implicitly, the kinds and degrees of flux described and experienced by the wanderer.

9 The special poignancy of morning-sorrow is not uncommon in OE, as in other poetry: cf. Resignation 95–96: him biÐ a sefa geomor, / mod morgenseoc, and uhtceare in The Wife's Lament 7.

10 The weallas ... hrime bihrorene complement the hrimcealde sœ in the first cluster.

11 When the wanderer buried his lord at line 23 he is dreorig (25); recapitulating this crisis in lines 83b–84 he refers impersonally to a dreorighleor eorl.

12 Cf. the wall in The Ruin described as rœghar ond readfah (10), and the citation in Bosworth-Toller: wiþ wyrmœtum lice.

13 Cf. lines 11b–14 of the Exeter Book Homiletic Fragment II:

Dom siþþan weox,

þea'h þeos læne gesceaft longe stode

heolstre gehyded, helme [g]edygled,

biþeaht wel treowum, þystre oferfæÐmed.