In this essay I argue that the Old English elegies “The Wanderer” and “The Seafarer” demonstrate the instability and fragility of Anglo-Saxon society. The reason for such instability is that the members of the un-Christian Anglo-Saxon society have no knowledge of God nor subsequently could they have any relationship with him. My analogies are based primarily on Plato’s “Myth of the Cave” from Book 7 of The Republic, and shall be furthermore expounded upon with Plotinus’ writing “On the Intellectual Beauty”. After discussing the essential content of Plato’s myth and the relationship thereof with Plotinus’ work, I shall apply them both as filters for my interpretation first to “The Wanderer”, and then to “The Seafarer”.
Plato’s “Myth of the Cave” demonstrates an individual’s release from ignorance into a profound experience upon seeing the very image of God, whom he calls the True, Good, and Beautiful, and whom Plotinus, in his work, calls the “One”. This encounter with God allows the individual to receive enlightenment, where, being thus released from ignorance, he is given the opportunity to contemplate God as he is (Plato 280). And being enlightened by such an experience, he can no longer see the “shadows which he formerly saw”, but rather only the realities of the world outside the cave (Plato 280). It also gives the individual a “perfect self-identity”, as he “forms a multiple unity with the God silently present” (117). This enlightenment causes an individual’s separation[1] from society, as it “upholds some beings, and they see; the lower are dazzled and turn away, unfit to gaze upon that sun” (Plotinus 117). Moreover, it causes the individual to reflect upon his alienation and the state of his fellow-prisoners who are left in the cave, pitying therefore their condition as members of an unenlightened society (Plato 281). Plato explains as well that “those who attain to this beatific vision are unwilling to descend to human affairs; for their souls are ever hastening into the upper world where they desire to dwell” (282). It is this beatific vision that is the profound experience – the conversion point – of the individuals exemplified in Plato’s and Plotinus’ works.
The individual’s conversion point prompts the individual to a journey to reach what Plotinus terms as “the Beauty There” (117), the place of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful in Plato’s universe, the residence of God, which is heaven. The journey is, however, not only a spiritual undertaking towards the ideal paradise, but it is, more importantly for the individual, a quest for ultimate self-identity. Plotinus implies that nearness to God allows an individual to see an image of himself in the light of a “better beauty” (Plotinus 117). The individual then would exhibit a desire to set upon a journey to reconcile his image of a better beauty with the reality upon which it is based, a reality which is in the same realm as God, which is the Beauty There. This reconciliation allows the “two [to] become one”, a unity which, in Christian terms, brings together the individual’s soul and God’s own being (Plotinus 117). This, following Plato’s and Plotinus’ works, is thus the objective of the Christian journey, a journey which, upon completion, gives the individual a perfect form of self-identity to be found only in his union with God.
The foundation built upon an individual’s union with God and the journey for such a unity are precisely what concern(s) the author(s) of both “The Wanderer” and “The Seafarer”. According to Crossley-Holland, both poems are chiefly concerned with the topic of loss (46). It is through the loss of the essential elements of their Anglo-Saxon societies that the speakers in the poems mark their alienation from their comitatus. This loss and alienation of the speakers evolves in the poems into a loss of their identity. Sharma suggests that “identity is always correlative to a cultural world” (611). Removing the individual from his society would thus be taking away his identity. The poems present this problem of identity and attempt to show the solution by having the speakers base the foundation of their identities not on their society but entirely on God.
In “The Wanderer” there is a longing to find a “ground for a self threatened by fragmentation and an abject loss of coherence on account of cultural upheaval” (Sharma 612). The cultural upheaval is experienced by the speaker of the poem through the “death of kinsmen” (line 7), his removal from his homeland (20), and his deprivation of the essential elements that make up his Anglo-Saxon heroic society, elements such as a hall and “a lord of rings” (25). All of these aspects of Anglo-Saxon culture that are specified in the poem point out to the speaker’s identity as an archetypal warrior of his society. And so his “loss of heroic culture”, as Sharma puts it, results in a loss of heroic identity (612). Indeed, the speaker laments over the complete ruin of his heroic society. He contemplates on “how the time has passed / …as if it never was” (95-96), how “that happy time is no more” (36), and, in lines 92-95, voices out his nostalgia for an atmosphere reflective of his heroic society; for ultimately the speaker stands as the last man of the Heroic Age, being placed in the poem in a “‘fiction’ of the apocalypse” (Green 502) as the Anglo-Saxons would have imagined it. Therefore such is the threat to the speaker’s self-identity that, due to the decline of the Anglo-Saxon heroic world, he experiences an “anxiety of meaninglessness”[2], an anxiety that makes him yearn for a sense stability for his identity.
This sense of stability he cannot find in his society but in God. In a world where kinsmen “fade on their way” (54), where the “middle-earth / from day to day dwindles and fails” (62-63), a world where “all is wretchedness in the realm of earth” (104), and almost everything is fleeting (108-109), the speaker turns to God for relief (1-2). It is in Him where “eal seo fæstnung stondeð” (115). In finding God, the speaker, as Plotinus explains it, “sinks into a perfect self-identity” (117). Through such a kind of self-awareness, the speaker “will learn how to achieve disillusionment, to move from destructive grief to healthy negativity” which is a kind of “melancholy logic” (Champion 195). This healthy negativity manifests itself in the form of the poem, the elegy recited by the speaker, which becomes the remedy, the bote (line 113) of the “good man” (112) for his grief. Where the “memories of kinsmen” (51) fail to bring him consolation, God offers the speaker the experience he needs to attain wisdom, for “no one is wise without his share of winters” (64). It is wisdom that allows the speaker in “The Wanderer”, being a figure representative of the released prisoners in Plato’s Cave, to reflect on his enlightened state and compare it to the state of those still left to “observe the passing shadows” (Plato 281). Thus, being identified in the last segment of the poem as “snottor on mode”, he is consequently described as one who is “sundor æt rune” (111). The speaker, sundered in his stage of wisdom, and given a perspective through which he can contrast his condition with that of his foregone heroic comitatus, mourns the fleetingness and passing-away of their heroic society through a series of repetitions of “hwær” (92-93), “eala” (94-95), and “læne” (108-109). His final remark in the poem serves to emphasise his “frofre” (115) in the steadfastness of God that is in stark contrast with the venerating lamentation that makes up most of his speech.
In “The Seafarer” there is a more apparent sense of immediacy expressed by the speaker to undertake a journey towards the “Beauty There”. He states his dissatisfaction with earthly life, saying, “Forþon me hatran sind / dryhtnes dreamas þonne þis deade lif, / læne on londe” (64-66). He is described by Greenfield as “an aspiring peregrinus, a voluntary exile who will relinquish earthly pleasures for the greater joys of Heaven” (15). At first, the speaker perceives his journey in the sea to be “a time of hardship” (3), a “wræccan lastum” (15), and furthermore describes himself to have “harboured bitter sorrow” (4), being a “sea-weary man” (12) who is “careworn and cut off from [his] kinsmen” (14). But his perspective on his sea-voyages changes beginning on line 33, marked by the word “nu” and a subsequent change of tense from the past to the present, where he is forthwith “stirred” (34) by his “heart’s longings / …to undertake a journey” (36-37). It is a “journey”, Calder explains, “to find the heavenly land” (272). Which journey is prompted by the speaker’s attempt to “locate [his life] in a meaningless present” (Green 506).
Indeed, the speaker is attempting to find a sense of belonging in a world where the “days of great glory / …are gone forever” (81-82) and “his former friends, / the sons of princes, have been placed in the earth” (93-94). And, as the speaker in “The Wanderer”, the speaker in “The Seafarer” endeavors to find his “perfect self-identity” in God. The chief catalyst that threatens to trap permanently the speaker in a meaningless present is the loss of his lord, whereupon there will no longer be a “protector-kinsman for his wretched spirit to travel toward” (Empric 25). His reaction to the threat, as exhibited in the word-play on the word “dryhten” in lines 41 and 43, is to shift his focus from earthly to spiritual pursuits (Greenfield 19-20). No longer does he need to rely on an earthly dryhten to give him a sense of self-identity; he realizes that “the splendours of this earth will [not] survive for ever” (66-67). Instead he looks to God and His “ecan eadignesse” (120) for permanent stability.
Upon thus being able to contemplate and unify their identity with God – the Sun in Plato’s myth – the speakers of both poems shift their speech from something that reflects the personal to something that ponders on the universal[3]. Their unification with God elevates the speakers to a place of greater vision and enlightenment, the place outside Plato’s Cave, whereupon they may contemplate not only their own condition, but also, in a new light, that of their un-Christianised comitatus. It is with this transcendent understanding that they gain the wisdom to talk about the instability of their society that is deprived of the knowledge of God. And it is also with such an understanding that they share in the poems the final mutual advice that invites their audience to find their perfect self-identification in God.
Bibliography:
Primary sources:
Plato. Book VII, The Republic. Plato: Selected Dialogues. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. Pennsylvania: The Franklin Centre, 1983. 279-282. Print.
Plotinus. “On the Intellectual Beauty”. The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed. David H. Richter. Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2007. 111 -119. Print.
“The Wanderer”. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. W.W. Norton & Company, 2013. 107-110. Print.
“The Wanderer”. The Old English Elegies: A Critical Edition and Genre Study. Ed. Anne L. Klinck. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992. 75-78. Print.
“The Seafarer”. The Old English Elegies: A Critical Edition and Genre Study. Ed. Anne L. Klinck. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992. 79 -83. Print.
Secondary sources:
Beaston, Lawrence. “The Wanderer’s Courage”. Neophilologus, 2005. Vol. 89: 119- 137. Online.
Calder, Daniel G. “Setting and Mode in ‘The Seafarer’ and ‘The Wanderer’. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 1971. Vol. 72 No. 2: 264-275. Online.
Champion, Margaret Gunnarsdóttir. “From Plaint to Praise: Language as Cure in ‘The Wanderer’”. Studia Neophilologica, 2008. Vol. 69 No. 2: 187-202. Online.
Empric, Julienne H. “’The Seafarer’: An Experience in Displacement”. Notre Dame English Journal. University of Notre Dame, 1972. Vol. 7 No. 2: 23-33. Online.
Green, Martin. “Man, Time, and Apocalypse in ‘The Wanderer’, ‘The Seafarer’, and ‘Beowulf’”. The Journal of English and Germanic Philology. University of Illinois Press, 1975. Vol. 74 No. 4: 502-518. Online.
Greenfield, Stanley B. “Attitudes and Values in ‘The Seafarer’. Studies in Philology. University of North Carolina Press, 1954. Vol. 51 No. 1: 15-20. Online.
“The Seafarer”. The Anglo-Saxon World: An Anthology. Ed. Kevin Crossley-Holland. Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 2009. 53-56. Print.
Sharma, Manish. “Heroic Subject and Cultural Substance in The Wanderer”. Neophilologus, 2012. Vol 96: 611-629. Online.
[1] Perhaps elevation would be a better term. An individual’s enlightenment causes him to see himself in a better state than that of the prisoners in the cave (Plato 281).
[2] ‘The anxiety of meaninglessness…is anxiety about the loss of an ultimate concern, of a meaning which gives meaning to all meanings’ (Beaston 126)
[3] See Sharma 621, Champion 197, and Empric 23.
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