Heroic Subject and Cultural Substance in The Wanderer

Abstract

Scholarship on The Wanderer has struggled to reconcile the Christian resolution of the poem with the speaker’s lingering dependence on Germanic-heroic cultural structures. The problem with the argument that heroic identity somehow persists for the speaker is, I suggest, that identity is always correlative to a cultural world. A “worldless” subject is a post-medieval, Cartesian innovation. The final lines of The Wanderer signal, in fact, that the speaker yearns for a new foundation for the self. With the loss of heroic culture, therefore, heroic identity loses its essential correlate. The crisis posed by the text is that the speaker experiences exile not only from a homeland, but also from the cultural framework that allowed his identity to cohere meaningfully. Nevertheless, the argument can be made that the poet seeks to preserve heroic values, and thereby salvage heroic identity. These values are deployed, however, with a new purpose: to confront resolutely the loss of the old cultural milieu. Heroic identity, therefore, finds an alternative correlate: not the immediate plenitude of a quasi-mythical heroic past, but a contemporary cultural modality mediated by its loss. The violence of an ideological and cultural transition is thus mitigated. I conclude by demonstrating how this reading situates The Wanderer precisely within the space of Anglo-Saxon literary production.