Talk:The Wanderer (Old English poem)

Author

Who is the author of this poem?Bdodo1992 01:31, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

Nobody knows. As the article states, was probably part of an oral tradition, which means that each teller would modify the poem a little. The version that finally got written down probably had dozens of contributors. It's kinda like a wikipedia article, without the documentation. Dsmdgold 13:53, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

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I just listened to Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy (Fantasie op 15 for Piano), which was his soloistic rendering of the leid "Der Wanderer", which I think, but I'm not sure, is based on this poem. If it's not, it should be. I've loved this piece of music since I was a child. I think Schubert does an masterful job of capturing the melancholy of the folly of confusing honour with war, gain with loss. The best recording I've ever heard - and I've heard a lot - is one by that old Nazi, Wilhelm Kempff. His politics were abohrrent, but maybe he traded his sole with the devil, because he plays like an angel. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Allanri (talk • contribs) 01:28, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

The Wanderer Fantasy is actually based on a song of Schubert's, which sets a text by Georg Phillip Schmidt. Here's a German text of the poem with English translation: while they share a kind of elegiac generality in that their wanderers are far from, and uncertain of, their homelands, they're not otherwise related. Antandrus (talk) 01:48, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

Post-conquest corpus?

I was just wondering if this passage needs editing...it seems to lack focus to me:

"The preoccupation with the siþ-motif in Anglo-Saxon literature is matched in many post-conquest texts where journeying is central to the text. A necessarily brief survey of the corpus might include Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and William Golding's Rites of Passage."

I'm not quite sure what the relevancy of this passage is: The Wanderer is a pre-conquest poem, and the 'corpus' given here spans a thousand years...as a Brit, I'd just like to point out that time has well and truly healed the wounds of the norman conquest in our minds. We don't really think about it. ;-) On a serious note though, the historical contexts of the 'corpus' given have very little in common with each other, and Gulliver's Travel for instance is a social satire, not a mournful look back pre-conquest England. Could anyone help me with working out what this paregraph's trying to say? Thanks. 41.240.124.59 (talk) 13:09, 7 February 2009 (UTC)

I was also troubled with this section, mainly because I have no idea what a "siþ motif" is, and the article doesn't bother to define it, it only gives examples of other "siþ motifs". I googled the phrase but got nothing, other than WP mirrors. Then I searched on "siþ" in Google Scholar and got 192 results, most of which seem to be non-Anglo-Saxony. Wiktionary says it can mean "journey" or "movement" in Anglo-Saxon, so I guess it comes from that, but is "siþ motif" an actual concept used in the scholarly literature, or is it an WP:OR term? Anyone got a citation? SheepNotGoats (Talk) 00:17, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

Just deleted the mention of the mysterious "siþ motif". I guess it's vandalism, and otherwise its of zero use without an explanation. Joepnl (talk) 04:34, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

Poem simular to Nine Herbs Charm

I have read bits of this Old English poem and find it very deep in Anglo-Saxon paganism and indeed it is around 597 when this was written i think the Anglo-Saxons were pagan when they wrote this and there is a strong connection to the Anglo-Saxon Head God Woden sense there is some lines that refer to him.

W. H.Auden's Wanderer

No reference to that Auden poem. A bad miss, isn't it? ....Added by some IP on 24 April 2010

The text and translation

Added in this edit by Prinsgezinde. The translation is remarkably similar to that here, here, and very likely elsewhere. Whose is it, Prinsgezinde, and what's its copyright status? -- Hoary (talk) 08:41, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

The first one. If needed, the translation can be removed. All I know is that the millenium-old text is obviously not copyrighted. Bataaf van Oranje (Prinsgezinde) (talk) 09:06, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

When you edit Wikipedia, Prinsgezinde, you declare that By clicking the "Save page" button, you agree to the Terms of Use. This talks about copyright status (You agree to the following licensing requirements:... etc etc). Assume that any material that is not very obviously in the public domain (not as this is popularly understood but as it is legally understood) is copyright, "all rights reserved". If it has explicitly been copylefted according to one of the licenses acceptable here, good. If it has been explicitly donated to the public domain, good. Otherwise, no. A millennium-old text will now be in the public domain. A particular version or reconstruction of a millennium-old text may very well be copyright. With these concerns in mind, I've deleted your addition. -- Hoary (talk) 04:18, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

Hoary, so you couldn't just keep the obviously uncopyrighted original text which can be found everywhere? Same is at Yankee Doodle. Bataaf van Oranje (Prinsgezinde) (talk) 16:11, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

I don't think you've understood what I wrote. The so-called "original text" (the transcription into today's graphemes of a handwritten manuscript) may well include scholarly work. If it does, then the fruit of this scholarly work may be old and thus in the public domain. But it may not be. Demonstrating (and not just asserting) that it is indeed in the public domain is the responsibility of whoever wants to add it to the article. The fact that this or that text "can be found everywhere" doesn't mean that, in the legal sense, it's in the public domain. -- Hoary (talk) 00:03, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

WikiProject Norse history and culture?

Why is this article a part of this WikiProject - its not a product of the Norse world in any meaningful sense, even if there is an argument for a little bit of cultural interaction in the textFaust.TSFL (talk) 19:52, 29 June 2022 (UTC)