A great deal has been written about The Wanderer. Though many critics adopt the newest critical theories as the basis of their analyses, the secondary literature is generally very conservative. Very few have challenged Lumiansky's argument that:
In The Wanderer the poet has created a dramatic situation in which the 'eardstapa', an 'anhaga' who has acquired wisdom as a result of his experiences, delivers the poem as a monologue, wholly Christian in tone, in which he contrasts the folly of emphasis on earthly things with the wisdom of emphasis on heaven (Lumiansky 1950, p. 105)
What does vary from article to article is the analysis of how the poet presents the spiritual development of the speaker, the precise chronology of this development and the identity of the speaker. Sometimes one receives the unfortunate impression that many of these critics are more showing the poem's infinite capacity to bear multiple meanings than saying anything meaningful about the place of the poem in the Anglo-Saxon literary canon.
The influence of Lumiansky's Bildungs-lyric reading is surprising, because it leaves unsolved many of the poem's problems (as Fowler's 1967 article eloquently demonstrates). Should the poem be called The Wanderer? When was it written? What is its genre? How many speakers does the poem feature? Is the poem a 'unity'?
It would be useful to know the genre of the poem. Genres encode a set of expectations about the content and structure of a poem. However, since no contemporary work on Anglo-Saxon poetics survives or perhaps ever existed, we have to try to fit Old English poems to foreign genres and suppose that the Anglo-Saxons were aware of the conditions of these genres. The Wanderer is usually identified as an elegy (Timmer 1942), but other genres have been proposed: planctus (Woolf 1975), consolatio (Cross 1961) and wisdom poetry (Shippey 1994). Of the Latin genres, consolatio is the most relevant (and Cross's article is a very worthwhile read), but the poem's most marked affiliations are with Old English wisdom poems like the Maxims. In his impressive essay, Shippey coins the term 'proverbiousness' to describe the style of these poems, which 'allows one to say the common / recognised / accepted thing, but at the same time, by alteration, framing, or juxtaposition, indicate an attitude towards the socially acceptable which is quite different from mere repetition' (p. 152).
Nor is it clear how many speakers the poem features: is there a narrative voice that reports and comments on a monologue? is a dialogue being staged? The argument for two speakers grew out of a perceived disjunction in tone between the first and second halves of the poem and uncertainty about the significance of the swa cwæð tags (Huppé 1943, Pope 1965). But in the only Old English poem that is definitely a dialogue, Solomon and Saturn, the speakers are distingished by a rubric, and Latin colloquies likewise distinguish their individual speakers. The question of speakers is therefore somewhat irrelevant: there may be multiple voices in the poem but they do not belong to discrete, fully defined characters (compare the comments of Fowler 1967, p. 5 and Bragg 1991, p. 135).
Questions relating to the 'unity' of the poem were most frequently posed during the nineteenth century, when critics attempted to distinguish between its original 'pagan' form and the 'Christianised' article that survives. The approach still surfaces: Prins 1964 attempted to splice together The Wanderer with Resignation, explaining that a scribe had carelessly misordered the pages in his exemplar; and Holowell 1983 excised the first five and last one and a half lines. This approach, though outmoded by the privilege it accords to a unique authorial original, is nonetheless interesting. Unlike New Criticism, it does not accept the poem unquestioningly, and is recognises that The Wanderer does not exhibit the poetic unity requisite favoured in modern poetry. Rather than excise these disjunctions, we should investigate what they tell us about Old English poetics.
The basic content of The Wanderer is easy enough to summarise: the loneliness of life as an exile in an ageing world and nostalgia for a past time. There is repeated recourse to proverbial wisdom. What we have is not the 'infinite deferral of the signified' (Pasternack 1991), but rather a set of signifiers that express a cluster of emotions with limited reference to narrative development. The poem cycles insistently through traditional themes: exile, ruined cities, abandoned mead-halls. It is the conjunction of these themes that gives the appearance of structural complexity and narrative development. But structural complexity and narrative development are products of a printed, well-spaced and lineated text and the mode of readings such texts encourage (see the introductory section on the manuscript). Rather, the mode of composition is 'generative' (as Rosier's superb 1964 article argues), one theme leads into another, line by line. Note, for instance, the circling recurrence in the first thirty-three lines of compounds in mod, ceare, bindan and their synonyms. What warrents investigation is not what the poem says but how it expresses its unchanging theme.