The Incredible Solace of Anglo-Saxon Elegies: Perceptions of the Self in The Wanderer and The Seafarer

This essay was written by Haven Barnes while studying abroad at Oxford during the spring 2024 semester. Haven is a senior computer science major at Dominican University, minoring in medieval history and mathematics.

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Antonina Harbus, in The Life of the Mind in Old English Poetry, writes, “The [Anglo-Saxon] elegies may employ conventional imagery and characteristic Old English vocabulary, but at the same time, they construct emotionally realistic portraits of human sensibility and mental processes which constitute the psychological validity of these texts” (Harbus 154-155). The Wanderer and The Seafarer, two Anglo-Saxon elegies found in The Exeter Book, share an interest in the relationship between the body and mind within the context of another relationship, isolation and fate. The Exeter Book is dated to the late 10th century and is one of four major codices of Anglo-Saxon elegies (Treharne 48). 

While the narrator in The Wanderer only has his memories to interact with, the narrator in The Seafarer is surrounded by the ocean as he or she reflects on it, as well as their own mind. The elegiac genre these two poems fall under has been debated in terms of its most vital constituents and how to define it without projecting modern vocabulary or theory onto it. Harbus also comments, how an elegy “is thematically centred on the mental world of an individual, first-person speaker” (Harbus 127). She also mentions they tend to focus on loss or separation, as well as “deploying memory in conscious spiritual development” (Harbus 129). As such, The Wanderer and The Seafarer use isolation to explore the interaction of the self, both within the narrator’s interior world and with the outside world, and understand what it is. Despite emphasizing the importance of selfrevelation, both poets warn of the futility of such an achievement if one fails to execute their realized purpose.

Beginning with a brief introduction to each poem, The Wanderer is a complex elegiac poem thought to either have been a single monologue or a narrated monologue with narratorial commentary (Treharne 54). The narrator recounts memories with his lord and fellow men, and laments how he has lost them. Though referred to as anhaga, ‘the solitary one,’ he finds comfort in his faith in God, which Harbus expands on and emphasizes the way in which the poem demonstrates life, metaphorically, as a dream (Harbus 171). She references lines 41-44, which describes a dream the narrator has in which he is reunited with his lord, and the contrast he witnesses upon awakening signals the dream’s function as “a metaphor for the insubstantial and illusory nature of this worldly existence in contrast to the eternal life of grace.” (Harbus 164). A final theme that appears not only in this poem, but also in The Seafarer, is fate. 

Though it appears quite explicitly in line 5, “Fate is very inflexible,” it appears in more subtle ways throughout the poem, which will be revisited later. The Wanderer’s use of the narrator’s mind as a playground, then, allows the poet to explore themes such as the proximity of the past, the role of isolation in connecting with God, and how fate relates to each of these topics. The Seafarer is thought to be a companion poem to The Wanderer, and they are often studied in conjunction. Indeed, there is significant structural and thematic overlap, such as discussions of isolation, the purpose of life and the transitory nature of it, yet The Seafarer probes the mind/body distinction more deeply with its unique exploration of the self as a subject/object relationship, in which the mind is the former and the body the latter. The poem discusses the “way by which we might progress to something more, to ecan eadignesse, ‘eternal bliss,’” and the body and mind’s role in facilitating this journey to divine reunion (Treharne 60). The sylf, or self, in the context of this poem refers not to a “body containing mind,” but as “a soul containing sins,” completely setting the body aside in this illustration of a human (Matto 176). While in The Seafarer the narrator expresses distress in being confined within their mind, The Wanderer’s narrator demonstrates anxiety about being bound by their body.

To understand the “self,” and how it is described and explored in both poems, it is necessary to examine how a human being is dissected in terms of a mind, body, and soul. Within the historical context of The Wanderer and The Seafarer, there are two schools of thought on how these constituents are demarcated according to their functions: early philosophers, such as Augustine, Boethius, and Plato, and contemporary vernacular Anglo-Saxon literature. While both view the mind and soul as separate entities, early philosophy interprets the mind as the intellect, while the Anglo-Saxons, in vernacular literature, refer to it as the mod, or willpower, which must be controlled (Godden 204)(Godden 308). Moreover, vernacular Anglo-Saxon literature places the mind in the seat of the heart, and therefore encapsulates the mod’s ability to both think and feel (Godden 303). In both The Wanderer and The Seafarer, there is palpable conflict between these parts of the sylf, as the mod yet desires transient life, as it is the home of community and companionship, yet this is accompanied by a sinking awareness of its imminent death. The notable anxiety about death is intensified, too, by the absence of a clear perception of time, reflecting the uncertainty of one’s death day, as the reader is not told how long the wanderer or seafarer have been isolated. In terms of the mod, it is unclear what controls it, whether that is the soul or another component, reminiscent of Plato’s tripartite soul. This disjunction is vividly demonstrated in The Seafarer (lines 10-12):

     …where sorrows surged

     hot about the heart. 

     Hunger inside tore the spirit of the sea-weary (Treharne). 

These three lines establish the simultaneous presence of the mod and the spirit, and the effect of the mod’s affective forces on the latter. It is peculiar here, despite the fact the mod is often associated with willpower, that the spirit instead is designated as the facilitator of will. It is also possible, as mentioned above, the “spirit” is the part of the mod which represents divine willpower that triumphs over the other, driving transient desires. Harbus quotes Godden on this predicament, who has “refined this line of argument to suggest that the poem takes its meaning from a disjunction between the mind, the faculty of thought and emotion, and the self, the controlling seat of consciousness.” (Harbus 165) There is also, in The Wanderer, a “habitual binding of sleep and sorrow,” illustrating how the narrator is overwhelmed not only by their memories, but also by the emotions generated by recalling them (Harbus 166). This also communicates tension between the body and mind, if they are viewed symbolically, wherein the body symbolizes the present and the mind the past. As memories are, in essence, recognized by contrasting the now-absent past with the present, it is this juxtaposition that evokes painful emotions. Nostalgia in both poems, then, allows the poet to experiment with portrayals of the transient life, demonstrating that eternal life after death will not cause the painful distinction between memory and his current situation the volatile temporal world offers. Although not stressed in The Seafarer to the degree it is in The Wanderer, there is yet a feeling of a mind confined to a body, and the enormous amount of willpower it requires to force it to comply with divine will (lines 74-78): 

     That he might earn before he must depart, 

     achievements on earth against the wickedness of enemies 

     opposing the devil with brave deeds 

     so that the children of men might praise him afterwards, 

     and his glory will live then among the angels (Treharne). 

These lines highlight an important counterargument to the undercurrent of disregard for the temporal world, as the body is a necessary vehicle to do good works in the world and enter heaven after death. Michael Matto, too, emphasizes this: 

Only by turning over the entire self – both the self-as-subject and the self-as-object, regardless of which part of the body/mind relationship is assigned which role – to the scrutiny of the community through selfrevelation can the speaker take on a new perspective (Matto 178). 

According to this, because both narrators in The Wanderer and The Seafarer are isolated, there is no basis of external comparison for their introspection and turmoil. However, while the poems do suggest the value of community in assuaging this predicament, they ultimately reject it as an anchor for identity stabilization, as all things must pass. There is no death without the body, and nothing for the divine will of the mod to triumph over, just as without the temptation of “evil” in the Garden, there would be no recognizable “good.” The Wanderer and The Seafarer, then, are able to tackle the complexity of the mind and body and remind their readers of the subtlety of the human experience within an early Christian framework.

 As this would typically be a highly erudite topic, the skill of the poet shines through in their ability to communicate emotion and build a bridge between the text and their reader. This bridge functions differently for its readership, as modern readers lack the cultural context Anglo-Saxon readers understood. Cognitive science has emphasized the relationship between chemical human emotion and the context it is embedded in. Harbus describes how “research into the emotions from several fields has shown us that though we might recognise apparently separate emotions, such as happiness or anger, the emotional web is tangled and interconnected with other aspects of being, sensing and interacting.” (Harbus 164). 

Therefore, as cultural context is one aspect of emotional experiences, so too is a human’s perception of themselves, their physiology, their memories that shape their comfort level with certain emotions, and other endless contributing factors. It appears, then, that the poets of The Wanderer and The Seafarer were attuned to this on an intuitive level, as it places the sylf at the center of conflicting dualities within it: the temporal and eternal life, the will of the two parts of the mod, isolation and community, and the present self, faced with consulting either the past or the future. Moreover, emotions in Anglo-Saxon literature are not described to be felt, but rather “taken.” Godden highlights how “feeling” is purely sensory in Old English, whereas someone can take “various mental states, such as anger or love, using the verb niman: ‘nim lufe to Gode,’ gif ure mod nim,’…” (Godden 299). Harbus stresses the fact Anglo-Saxon authors were cautious to not designate the person, but rather the mind alone, as the site of emotion (Godden 169). This aligns with how emotions were “taken” and not “felt,” as they are taken into the mind, the mod, to be evaluated, and thus begins the war between the divine and temporal will. 

The poets of The Wanderer and The Seafarer demonstrate a strong interest in an analytical approach to introspection. Both narrators refuse to perceive themselves as a whole human, but rather interpret their individual components, body and mod. The complexity of the human experience embedded in an early Christian framework is visualized in both poems as perpetual conflict between the human and divine within each person, two parts that may be harmonized in Christ yet remain in opposition for mortals. By leveraging the narrators’ experience with isolation, the reader can access an unusually raw perspective of their emotions and inner experience, devoid of the variables Harbus describes can manipulate and alter the emotional landscape. Because the poets have removed any indication of how long the wanderer or seafarer have been isolated, the urgency to execute God’s will is heightened, as neither of the narrator’s know when they will die. Both poems approach the conflict that persists between the two forces of the mod, despite the urgency generated by the fear of death, which communicates a distinct existential aspect of the human experience and challenges the fantasy of discovering one’s purpose. Revelation, therefore, means nothing if it is never realized.

Works Cited

Godden, Malcom. "Anglo-Saxons on the Mind." Old English Literature: Critical Essays. Ed. R.M. Liuzza. Yale University Press, 2002. 

Harbus, Antonina. "Cognitive Approaches to the History of Emotions and the Emotional Dynamic." Harbus, Antonina. Cognitive Approaches to Old English Poetry. Boydell & Brewer, 2012. 

Harbus, Antonina. "Deceptive Dreams in The Wanderer." Studies in Philology 93 (1996): 164-179. 

Harbus, Antonina. "The Mind as the Seat of Emotions: the Elegiac Strain." Harbus, Antonina. The Life of the Mind in Old English Poetry. Brill, 2002. 

Matto, Michael. "True Confessions: The Seafarer and Technologies of the Sylf." Journal of English and German Philology 103.2 (2004): 156-179. 

Treharne, Elaine, ed. Old and Middle English c.890-1450, An Anthology. Third Edition. Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

 Image Citations

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Renoir, Pierre-Auguste. Seascape. The Art Institute of Chicago. Accessed December 3, 2024. https://www.artic.edu/artworks/81557/seascape