The Wanderer is one of a group of poems in the Exeter Book of Old English poetry generally referred to as “elegies” (Klinck 1992, 11–12, 221–51). This is largely because they treat the subject of loss and alienation through the experiences, recollections and reflections of a persona. While all such categories are subject to modification, the “elegy” classification not only usefully captures characteristic features of the poems, but also shows how in the last fifty years the predominant view of the poems has changed from embracing the possibility that different speakers might be given voice within the same poem (Huppé 1943, Pope 1965, Bolton 1969), to a consensus that a single person speaks

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Published 04 November 2009

Citation: Cavill, Paul. "The Wanderer". The Literary Encyclopedia. 4 November 2009.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=24335, accessed 21 November 2009.]