As I
read “The Wanderer,” I couldn’t help but be reminded of Lord of the Rings. Perhaps
that’s a testament to my nerdiness, perhaps (I’d like to think) a testament to
an appreciation of genius. And of
course, it stands to reason that Anglo-Saxon literature would resemble Tolkien;
after all, it is the original and he the copier. Yet this poem in particular stood out as
especially similar, making me wonder what he drew from it – or what both
authors drew from life – that is so compelling.
The
most striking passage, I thought, was the ubi
sunt – the “where are they?” The
speaker pleads, “Where did the steed go?
Where the young warrior? Where
the treasure-giver? Where the seats of
fellowship? Where the hall’s festivity?”
(92-3) For this warrior, at least, the world is in its latter days, beyond the
golden times (though not by much) and looking back with deep nostalgia. Though the speaker still lives in what we
would consider a fairy-tale-esque world, he too is looking to the past to find
the legendary years. In Lord of the Rings too, characters live
after the years of perfection. Gondor is
falling into ruin; Rohan looks to the past for consolation in the present. All this digression is to point out that
there is something romantic, common to our experience, and deeply moving about
looking to the past and creating of it a time of legend and lore, glory and a story-like
feel. It seems that, living in the
present moment, it is difficult to recognize the story we may be living right
now. However, the lives of this day
become stories too, in time. Such is the
case for the wanderer, whose tale of woe now stirs up longing in me for an age
that is past. We do well to live our
lives now in a way that will make the right kind of story for those to come.
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