Changes

1 # Wyrd is the Old English word for Fate, a powerful but not quite personified force. It is related to the verb weorthan, meaning roughly ‘to occur’. Its meanings range from a neutral ‘event’ to a prescribed ‘destiny’ to a personified ‘Fate’; it is useful to think of wyrd as ‘what happens’, usually in a negative sense. In a poem so preoccupied with puzzling over the nature and meaning of wyrd, it seemed appropriate to leave the word untranslated.2 # The Exeter Book manuscript in which the poem survives does not have quotation marks, or clear indications of where one speech begins and ends in this poem; we are not sure whether lines 1-5 are spoken by the same character that speaks the following lines, or whether they are the narrator’s opinion on the general situation of the Wanderer.3 # The description seems to be some sort of ceremony of loyalty, charged with intense regret and longing.4 # Or “when the mind surveys the memory of kinsmen.”5 # The grammar and reference of this intense, almost hallucinatory scene is not entirely clear; the translation 6 # Ruined buildings are called ‘the work of giants’ (enta geweorc) in several places in OE literature.7 # Or ‘keeps faith’. These last lines offer an answer to the Wanderer’s unresolved melancholia – the wisdom of self-control and the hope of Christian salvation.