User:Eklektikos/Slovaklitdraft

Resignation

Riddles

The Fortunes of Men

The Rhyming Poem

Vainglory

The Wanderer

Synopsis
The Wanderer conveys the meditations of a solitary exile, or anhaga (from 'ana' meaning 'one'), on his past glories as a warrior in his lord's band of retainers, his present hardships and the values of forbearance and faith in the heavenly Lord. The warrior is identified as eardstapa (line 6a), usually translated as "wanderer", who roams the cold seas and walks "paths of exile" (wræclastas). He remembers the days when he served his lord, feasted together with comrades, and received precious gifts from the lord. Yet fate (wyrd) turned against him when he lost his lord, kinsmen and comrades in bloody deaths in battle, and was driven into exile, a loss which he laments every morning. Often sorrow and sleep ( sorg und slæp) combine to provide him with a dream image of his lost lord, whom he clasps and kisses, before waking to find himself alone on a snow-covered beach where fallow waves wash seabirds (fealwe wegas/baþian brimfuglas).

In the second half of the poem, the speaker reflects upon life while spending years in exile, and to some extent has gone beyond his personal sorrow. In this respect, the poem is a "wisdom poem", where hard experience is turned into spiritual wisdom. A number of maxims on how a wise man should behave are expressed, for example that he should not speak hastily or overly impassioned. The degeneration of “earthly glory” is presented as inevitable in the poem, contrasting with the theme of salvation through faith in God.

The wanderer vividly describes his loneliness and yearning for the bright days past, and concludes with an admonition to put faith in God, "in whom all stability dwells". It has been argued by some scholars that this admonition is a later addition, as it lies at the end of a poem that some would say is otherwise entirely secular in its concerns; but inasmuch as many of the words in the poem have both secular and spiritual or religious meanings, the foundation of this argument is not on firm ground.

The psychological or spiritual progress of the wanderer has been described as an "act of courage of one sitting alone in meditation", who through embracing the values of Christianity seeks "a meaning beyond the temporary and transitory meaning of earthly values".

Critical History
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the prevelant philological method of the time aimed at the recovery of a hypothesised Germanic protolanguage and pagan past by stripping the poem of Latinite Christian influences. Such practices had fallen out of favour by the mid-twentieth century, in part because of their association with a discredited German nationalism, and in part because of the tenousness of any obvious similarities between the world of The Wanderer and the First Century comitatus described in Tacitus's Germania.

With the emergence of The New Criticism,

Influences
Tolkien, Auden In 2010 the Chopra Foundation sponsored the first Sages and Scientists Symposium, attended by a number of scientists, social scientists and artists from around the world, with a second symposium hosted in February 2011. The third symposium is scheduled for March 2012 with seminars relating to Alzheimer's Disease and "Past Life Memories" amongst others.