Anonymous polyphony and<i>The Wanderer</i>'s textuality

Pasternack, Carol Braun

doi:10.1017/s0263675100001770

Cited by 5 publications

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“…Pope (1974) then recanted and claimed a single speaker. Pasternack (1991), concerned with the various pronoun shifts and with the application of poststructural theory to the poem, attempts to completely explode the poem's unity, and posits a polyphony of voices rather than the traditional one or two speakers.…”

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From AnhagaTo Snottor: The Wanderer’s Kierkegaardian Epiphany

Ganze

2005

Neophilologus

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A basic theological unity underlies the Old English poem The Wanderer, reconciling The Wanderer's existentialist tone with the eardstapa's Christian epiphany. Many readings argue that Anglo-Saxon Christians were unable to have the sorts of existentialist doubts being voiced by the eardstapa; any expression of doubt immediately precludes the speaker being Christian. Critics cite twentieth-century, atheistic versions of existentialism as proof of this assertion. Given the poem's cultural milieu, it seems wiser to turn to religious existentialists to find parallels for the existentialist despair and its religious answer that we find in The Wanderer. Søren Kierkegaard provides a close parallel; The Sickness Unto Death and the Concluding Unscientific Postscript both offer faith as an answer to the despair felt by those overwhelmed in worldliness. The eardstapa follows this path when he sits sundor aet rune at the poem's end; the process of conquering existential despair through faith is precisely what the poem attempts to chronicle. A more thorough examination of the poem in light of the existentialism of Kierkegaard indicates that claims for the poem's existentialist leanings are warranted; critics have chosen the wrong existentialist philosophers to inform their readings of the poem, and have wrongly assumed that the poem's existentialism is incompatible with its Christianity.Neophilologus (2005) 89: 629-640 Ó Springer 2005

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From AnhagaTo Snottor: The Wanderer’s Kierkegaardian Epiphany

Ganze

2005

Neophilologus

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Wanderer, The

Hanchey

2017

The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain

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The Wanderer is an Old English poem that mourns a Germanic‐heroic past while still finding Christian consolation in the new post‐heroic age. Its central figure lives in exile. The poem survives in the Exeter Book, an Anglo‐Saxon manuscript dating to the second half of the tenth century. Though most regard The Wanderer as an elegy, the poem's genre is debated, as is the question of how many speakers narrate it and the extent to which Christian and secular concerns affect the poem's unity. Because The Wanderer , like other Old English poems, originates from an oral tradition, readers must consider that it makes meaning in different ways than do poems deriving from a solely written tradition.

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The Wanderer and the Legacy of Pathetic Fallacy

Soper

2023

Neophilologus

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The Old English poem known as The Wanderer has long been said to rely on the device of ‘pathetic fallacy’ in its descriptions of stormy and frozen land- and seascapes. This piece of literary-critical terminology has strong ties to both Romantic and realist aesthetic ideals of the nineteenth century, and this paper outlines the assumptions which underpin the term and questions our continued use of it when discussing The Wanderer. By pointing us towards the external world as a projection of the interior psychological world of the ‘wanderer’ figure, the term obscures two key features of the text. Firstly, the label sweeps to the side the literal significance of the material world to which the poem’s central speaker responds, despite the fact that this landscape bears marks of divine anger and potency and seems to participate in the Augustinian tradition of the degraded Sixth Age of the World. Secondly, the term points us towards a dramatic characterisation of a single heroic-age nobleman in a manner that the text is itself relatively uninterested in pursuing, instead emphasising conditions of exile, isolation, and despair as universalised spiritual problems. Seeing this poem as governed by pathetic fallacy distracts us from such facets, when other interpretive frameworks have more to offer.

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Anonymous polyphony andThe Wanderer's textuality

Cited by 5 publications

References 21 publications

From AnhagaTo Snottor: The Wanderer’s Kierkegaardian Epiphany

From AnhagaTo Snottor: The Wanderer’s Kierkegaardian Epiphany

Wanderer, The

The Wanderer and the Legacy of Pathetic Fallacy

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