From AnhagaTo Snottor: The Wanderer’s Kierkegaardian Epiphany

Abstract

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. Soren 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.