The Wanderer VS. Beowulf

The Wanderer is a poem about the loneliness of life as an exile in an ageing world and reminiscence for a past time. This used to be a pagan poem but has now been reworked into a Christian text and there is a lot of proverbial wisdom in it. The poem cycles insistently through traditional themes: exile and abandoned mead-halls.

Everything I have described about The Wanderer almost exactly parallels with the poem Beowulf. In this essay I will discuss where it is this wanderer has come from, then compare the two poems’ correlating themes and finally, the symbols and motifs connecting them.

In The Wanderer he is exiled and prays for compassion and mercy from his lord, but doesn’t receive it. They don’t directly tell us why he is exiled but they keep mentioning fate and saying that he can’t escape fate. They say that he was a warrior before he became exiled and there is a possible intertwining connection to Beowulf here. At the end of Beowulf when he fought the dragon there was only one warrior by his side, the rest ran away. A warrior who runs away from a battle deserves punishment for not doing his job and letting people down. So it is possible that they were all exiled and force to “continue to run” or “wander” for the rest of their lives. Therefore, there is a possibility that the wanderer in this poem is one of the warriors who was exiled from Beowulf. And considering both these stories where saved from the same fire and written at the same time, it is immensely possible that this character exists in both stories.

The themes of these two poems are so closely woven that it would make sense that the authors could have known each other’s stories and were writing them to have similar structure and purpose. As I stated before, the two major themes that I picked out that relate the two poems are exile and abandoned mead-halls. The wanderer is an exiled warrior, and all the descendants of Cain in Beowulf are exiled as well. In both stories they describe how hard it is to be exiled from everyone and how they just want God’s mercy, again with the Christianity. However, Beowulf isn’t strictly Christian like The Wanderer was reworked to be, contains multiple parts that are Pagan as well. This adds one more connection between the two poems.

One of the major symbols or motifs that occur often in these two poems is the reference to winter. Generally the winter months are desolate, cold and most of the nature is dead. In literary context winter means death, and even though Jesus didn’t actually die on Christmas, a lot of death occurs in texts around Christmas.

From all the evidence I have shown there is no doubt in my mind that the similarities between these two poems is no coincidence, in fact they were put together this way purposely to show connections, and to make them stronger and more complex writings.