"Where are the horses? Where are the heroes?": an Old English exile asks what became of everyone he knew, and the poem answers with a wall
A close read of The Wanderer, lines 88-111, in the 1918 Faust and Thompson translation: an exile asks where the horses and the heroes went, and the poem answers with a wall, four clauses about lending, and a verb that means 'becomes'.
The Wanderer survives in one manuscript. A scribe copied it into the Exeter Book in the late tenth century, and no second copy has ever been found 1.
Its subject is a man who has lost his lord, his hall and his companions, and who speaks about it at length.
The manuscript gives the poem no title. It begins where the poem before it ends, and as late as 1826 a scholar read the two as one work 1. Benjamin Thorpe separated them in 1842 and supplied the name, and the name has held 1.
Tolkien disliked it and spent years proposing others, among them The Exile's Lament 1. The poem's own word for its speaker is eardstapa, a stepper over the earth 2.
The English below is Cosette Faust's and Stith Thompson's, from Old English Poems (Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1918), a volume that renders these poems "into the original meter" 3. Each line keeps four stresses, a pause in the middle, and alliteration binding the halves.
The margins of their page 66 carry the Anglo-Saxon line numbers. The passage is lines 88 to 111 of a poem of 115 lines 1.
Passage
He who the waste of this wall-stead wisely considers, And looks down deep at the darkness of life, Mournful in mind, remembers of old Much struggle and spoil and speaks these words: 'Where are the horses? Where are the heroes? Where are the high treasure-givers? Where are the proud pleasure-seekers? Where are the palace and its joys? Alas the bright wine-cup! Alas the burnie-warriors! Alas the prince's pride! How passes the time Under the shadow of night as it never had been! Over the trusty troop now towers full high A wall adorned with wondrous dragons. The strength of the spear has destroyed the earls, War-greedy weapons, Wyrd inexorable; And the storms strike down on the stony cliffs; The snows descend and seize all the earth In the dread of winter; then darkness comes And dusky night-shade. Down from the north The hated hail-storms beat on heroes with fury. All on earth is irksome to man; Oft changes the work of the fates, the world under the firmament. Here treasure is fleeting; here true friends are fleeting; Here comrades are fleeting; here kinsmen are fleeting. All idle and empty the earth has become.' So says the sage one in mind, as he sits and secretly ponders.
Two hundred and six words, page 66 of the 1918 printing 3. The printer sets each half-line apart with a wide gap: that gap is the caesura, the pause in the middle of an Anglo-Saxon line.
Gloss
- "adorned with wondrous dragons" — weal wundrum hēah, wyrmlīcum fāh. Wyrmlīc is "form of a serpent," and fāh is variegated, stained, gleaming 5. The wall is patterned with serpent forms, the way a surface is dyed or stained. Thorpe, printing the poem in 1842, took the -līc of wyrmlīcum for līc, "body, corpse," and wrote "with worm carcases foul" 6.
Close read
The passage is a speech handed to a second man and quoted from him. The poet has already given the poem to the eardstapa. Here someone who has "wisely considered" the ruin steps forward, and the poem reports that he "speaks these words."
The 1918 printing marks the shift with a quotation mark. The Anglo-Saxon carries it on one verb, ācwið, "says out," and on the ear of whoever hears the line 2.
Then the questions. Four of the five start with hwǣr cwōm, "where came" 2. The verb is motion in the past tense, so each question already describes a departure. The fifth shifts to hwǣr sindon, "where are," as though the hall's joys might still be somewhere. The 1918 version flattens all five into "where are."
Nothing answers them. The list ends on a question mark, and the next sentence is masonry: over the troop towers a wall, high and marvellously built, patterned with serpents.
That wall is probably Roman. A footnote in the 1918 volume records the phrase such ruins carried in this poetry, "the old work of the giants" 3. The ruin in the poem stood somewhere, in a real field.
The questions then turn into address. Ēalā, "alas," comes three times in two lines, thrown at a cup, a mail-shirt and a prince's glory 2. The missing are spoken to as though present, and the grief turns outward into the room.
After that the passage needs someone to act, and finds nobody human. The earls are destroyed by "war-greedy weapons," a weapon doing the killing, and then by wyrd. From the next line the subjects are storms, snow, night and hail, which strike, seize and bind. By then every verb that could belong to a man belongs to the weather.
The last four clauses repeat a single adjective: feoh lǣne, frēond lǣne, mōn lǣne, mǣg lǣne. Wealth lent, friend lent, man lent, kinsman lent 2. The list narrows from property to kin, and the one word that holds still is the word for lent.
The closing verb is weorþeð, "becomes." Wyrd, named as the destroyer ten lines earlier, is the noun made from that same verb. The poem asks where everything went, calls the answer fate, and then says the foundation of the earth becomes empty. The two words are one word.
The frame shuts with the sage sitting apart and pondering secretly. The speech ends outside the man who made it, in a room where the reader is also sitting.
Why it still matters
A poem this exposed has no business surviving. One manuscript, one copy, and the whole of the Wanderer depends on a book that might have gone the way of most books 1.
It reached print in 1842, in Thorpe's edition, with his English facing the Anglo-Saxon in two columns 6. At the wall he printed "with worm carcases foul." At the four clauses he printed "here is wealth transient, here is a friend transient, here is man transient."
The lines have had a louder afterlife than most Old English verse. Tolkien took the questions for the Lament of the Rohirrim — "Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?" — and that is where most English readers now meet the form 7.
The poem's advice is severe: bind your grief fast in your breast before you speak of it, keep your heart's locker shut. It then spends a hundred lines saying everything. The advice and the practice pull apart, and the practice is the part readers have kept.
Reflection
The exile is told to lock his sorrow in a chest inside his chest. He talks for a hundred lines instead. What have you kept shut that way, and what would it take to say it out?
References
- 1Wikipedia: The Wanderer (Old English poem)
en.wikipedia.org
- 2Wikisource: Bright's Anglo-Saxon Reader, The Wanderer
en.wikisource.org
- 3Internet Archive: Old English Poems (1918)
archive.org
- 4Wikipedia: Wyrd
en.wikipedia.org
- 5
- 6Internet Archive: Codex Exoniensis (1842)
archive.org
- 7Wikipedia: Lament for the Rohirrim
en.wikipedia.org
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