You might recognise these words, the first four lines of folio 76v of the Exeter Book:
OFT him anhaga are gebideð metudes miltse þeahþe
he mod cearig geond lagu lade longe scrolde hreran
mid hondum hrim cealde sæ wadan wræc lastas wyrd
bið ful aręd . Swa cwæð eard stapa earfeþa gemyndig
These are the first six lines of the poem we now call The Wanderer, but the arrangement differs from the presentation with which you are familiar. There's no title. There are more words and less punctuation. The words are not arranged in self-contained lines. There are no line-numbers to permit elaborate cross-references. Either (like Pope 1965) one conjectures that there has been 'a mechanical failure in the written presentation of the poem', or one accepts that the concept of 'poem' was understood in a fundamentally different manner by Anglo-Saxons. This is something too many modern critics forget.
Even titling the poem creates a set of expectations that would not have occured to a reader of the Exeter Book. The current title - The Wanderer - was proposed by Benjamin Thorpe in 1852. Several critics have proposed alternatives: Mutability (Huppé 1943), The Exile's Consolation (Lumiansky 1950) and even The Wanderer's Lament and the Wise Man's meditation: being a double elegy and most doleful consolation in two voices and an epilogue, wherein they that have lost what they have loved may behold the image of their sorrow and may feelingly know that all things earthly vanish into night (Pope 1965)! What is important for the modern reader to remember is that the title is just a convenient short-hand to refer to the poem and in no way reflects how Anglo-Saxons approached the text.
The Wanderer survives only because the Exeter Book survives, where it appears on fols. 76v-78r. Though this is the only copy of the poem to survive, critics usually assume that the poem had a wide circulation in Anglo-Saxon England. There's very little evidence for this assumption, though the occasional 'errors' that seem to arise from miscopying may suggest this is not the autograph of the poem. It's therefore more productive to stop looking for 'an original text that the manuscript badly represents' (Pasternack 1991), one supposedly written c. 900 (Bliss and Dunning 1969, pp. 102-4), and to concentrate on the poem in its most immediate context. For more information on the poem in its Exeter Book context, see the section on 'the manuscript' in the hypertext edition of the Wife's Lament, here.
Images of the manuscript text of the poem are available here and here.