Translation: R.M. Liuzza

Always the one alone longs for mercy,
the Maker’s mildness, though, troubled in mind,
across the ocean-ways he has long been forced
to stir with his hands the frost-cold sea,
and walk in exile’s paths. Wyrd is fully fixed! ^[1]
Thus spoke the Wanderer, mindful of troubles,
of cruel slaughters and the fall of dear kinsmen: ^[2]
“Often alone, every first light of dawn,
I have lamented my sorrows. There is no one living
to whom I would dare to reveal clearly
my deepest thoughts. I know it is true
that it is in the lordly nature of a nobleman
to closely bind his spirit’s coffer,
hold his treasure-hoard, whatever he may think.
The weary mind cannot withstand wyrd,
the troubled heart can offer no help,
and so those eager for fame often bind fast
in their breast-coffers a sorrowing soul,
just as I have had to take my own heart —
often wretched, cut off from my homeland,
far from dear kinsmen — and bind it in fetters,
ever since long ago I hid my gold-giving friend
in the darkness of earth, and went wretched,
winter-sad, over the binding waves,
sought, hall-sick, a treasure-giver,
wherever I might find, far or near,

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^[1] Wyrd is the Old English word for Fate, a powerful but not quite personified force. It is related to the verb weorthan, meaning roughly ‘to occur’.
Its meanings range from a neutral ‘event’ to a prescribed ‘destiny’ to a personified ‘Fate’; it is useful to think of wyrd as ‘what happens’, usually in a negative sense. In a poem so preoccupied with puzzling over the nature and meaning of wyrd, it seemed appropriate to leave the word untranslated.
^[2] The Exeter Book manuscript in which the poem survives does not have quotation marks, or clear indications of where one speech begins and ends in this poem; we are not sure whether lines 1-5 are spoken by the same character that speaks the following lines, or whether they are the narrator’s opinion on the general situation of the Wanderer.

someone in a meadhall who knew of my people,
or who’d want to comfort me, friendless,
accustom me to joy. He who has come to know
how cruel a companion is sorrow
to one who has few dear protectors, will understand this:
the path of exile claims him, not patterned gold,
a winter-bound spirit, not the wealth of earth.
He remembers hall-holders and treasure-taking,
how in his youth his gold-giving lord
accustomed him to the feast—that joy has all faded.
And so he who has long been forced to forego
his dear lord’s beloved words of counsel will understand:
when sorrow and sleep both together
often bind up the wretched exile,
it seems in his mind that he clasps and kisses
his lord of men, and on his knee lays
hands and head, as he sometimes long ago
in earlier days enjoyed the gift-throne. ^[3]
But when the friendless man awakens again
and sees before him the fallow waves,
seabirds bathing, spreading their feathers,
frost falling and snow, mingled with hail,
then the heart’s wounds are that much heavier,
pain after pleasure. Sorrow is renewed
when the memory of kinsmen flies through the mind; ^[4]
he greets them with great joy, greedily surveys
hall-companions — they always swim away;
the floating spirits bring too few
well-known voices. Cares are renewed
for one who must send, over and over,
a weary heart across the binding of the waves. ^[5]
And so I cannot imagine for all this world
why my spirit should not grow dark
when I think through all this life of men,
how they suddenly gave up the hall-floor,
mighty young retainers. Thus this middle-earth
droops and decays every single day;
and so a man cannot become wise, before he has weathered
his share of winters in this world. A wise man must be patient,
neither too hot-hearted nor too hasty with words,
nor too weak in war nor too unwise in thoughts,
neither fretting nor frivolous nor greedy for wealth,
never eager for boasting before he truly understands;
a man must wait, when he makes a boast,
until the brave spirit understands truly

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^[3] The description seems to be some sort of ceremony of loyalty, charged with intense regret and longing.
^[4] Or “when the mind surveys the memory of kinsmen.”
^[5] The grammar and reference of this intense, almost hallucinatory scene is not entirely clear; the translation reflects one commonly-proposed reading.

whither the thoughts of his heart will turn.
The wise man must realize how ghostly it will be
when all the wealth of this world stands waste,
as now here and there throughout this middle-earth
walls stand blasted by wind,
beaten by frost, the buildings crumbling.
The wine halls topple, their rulers lie
deprived of all joys; the proud old troops
all fell by the wall. War carried off some,
sent them on the way, one a bird carried off
over the high seas, one the gray wolf
shared with death—and one a sad-faced man
covered in an earthen grave. The Creator
of men thus wrecked this enclosure,
until the old works of giants stood empty,
without the sounds of their former citizens.^[6]
He who deeply considers, with wise thoughts,
this foundation and this dark life,
old in spirit, often remembers
so many ancient slaughters, and says these words:
‘Where has the horse gone? where is the rider? where is the giver of gold?
Where are the seats of the feast? where are the joys of the hall?
O the bright cup! O the brave warrior!
O the glory of princes! How the time passed away,
slipped into nightfall as if it had never been!’
There still stands in the path of the dear warriors
a wall wondrously high, with serpentine stains.
A torrent of spears took away the warriors,
bloodthirsty weapons, wyrd the mighty,
and storms batter these stone walls,
frost falling binds up the earth,
the howl of winter, when blackness comes,
night’s shadow looms, sends down from the north
harsh hailstones in hatred of men.
All is toilsome in the earthly kingdom,
the working of wyrd changes the world under heaven.
Here wealth is fleeting, here friends are fleeting,
here man is fleeting, here woman is fleeting,
all the framework of this earth will stand empty.
So said the wise one in his mind, sitting apart in meditation.
He is good who keeps his word,^[7] and the man who never too quickly
shows the anger in his breast, unless he already knows the remedy,
how a nobleman can bravely bring it about. It will be well for one who seeks mercy,
consolation from the Father in heaven, where for us all stability stands.

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^[6] Ruined buildings are called ‘the work of giants’ (enta geweorc) in several places in OE literature.
^[7] Or ‘keeps faith’. These last lines offer an answer to the Wanderer’s unresolved melancholia – the wisdom
of self-control and the hope of Christian salvation.

Wondrous is this foundation – the fates have broken
and shattered this city; the work of giants crumbles.
The roofs are ruined, the towers toppled,
frost in the mortar has broken the gate,
torn and worn and shorn by the storm,
eaten through with age. The earth’s grasp
holds the builders, rotten, forgotten,
the hard grip of the ground, until a hundred
generations of men are gone. This wall, rust-stained
and covered with moss, has seen one kingdom after another,
stood in the storm, steep and tall, then tumbled.
The foundation remains, felled by the weather,
it fell…..^[8]
grimly ground up ….
……cleverly created….
…… a crust of mud surrounded …
….. put together a swift
and subtle system of rings; one of great wisdom
wondrously bound the braces together with wires.
Bright were the buildings, with many bath-houses,
high noble gables and a great noise of armies,
many a meadhall filled with men’s joys,
until mighty fate made an end to all that.
The slain fell on all sides, plague-days came,
and death destroyed all the brave swordsmen;
the seats of their idols became empty wasteland,
the city crumbled, its re-builders collapsed
beside their shrines. So now these courts are empty,
and the rich vaults of the vermilion roofs
shed their tiles. The ruins toppled to the ground,
broken into rubble, where once many a man
glad-minded, gold-bright, bedecked in splendor,
proud, full of wine, shone in his war-gear,
gazed on treasure, on silver, on sparkling gems,
on wealth, on possessions, on the precious stone, ^[9]
on this bright capital of a broad kingdom.
Stone buildings stood, the wide-flowing stream
threw off its heat; a wall held it all
in its bright bosom where the baths were,

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^[8] Several lines are lost here; the translation tries to make sense of a few surviving words, but this section is best skipped when reading the poem.
^[9] The singular form here is unexpected, but may be nothing more than a collective noun.

Translation: R.M. Liuzza

I sing a true song of myself,
tell of my journeys, how in days of toil
I’ve often suffered troubled times,
hard heartache, come to know
in the keel of a ship many of care’s dwellings,   5
terrible tossing of the waves, where the anxious
night-watch often held me at the ship’s stem
when it knocks against the cliffs. Pinched with cold
were my feet, bound by frost
in cold fetters, while cares seethed   10
hot around my heart, hunger tore from within
my sea-weary mind. That man does not know,
he whose lot is fairest on land,
how I, poor wretch, dwelt all winter
in the ice-cold sea in the paths of exile,   15
deprived of dear kinsmen,
hung with icicles of frost while hail flew in showers.
I heard nothing there but the noise of the sea,
the ice-cold waves; the wild swan’s song
sometimes served as my music, the gannet’s call   20
and the curlew’s cry for the laughter of men,
the seagull’s singing for mead-drink.
Storms beat the stone cliffs where the tern answered them,
icy-feathered; often the eagle screamed,
dewy-feathered – no sheltering family   25
could bring consolation to my abandoned soul.
And so^[1] he who has tasted life’s joy in towns,
and few sad journeys, scarcely believes,
proud and puffed up with wine, what I, weary,
have often had to endure in my seafaring.   30

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^[1] The repeated connecting word forthon is notoriously difficult in this poem –
it points forwards and/or backwards, meaning either ‘therefore’ or ‘thus’.
In a poem whose logical progression is by no means clear or easy to follow this is a significant source of ambiguity.
I have chosen to render it with the vague ‘and so’, hoping to preserve some of the interpretive difficulty found in the original.

The night-shadow darkened; snow came from the north,
frost bound the ground, hail fell on earth,
coldest of grains. And so^[2] they compel me now,
my heart-thoughts, to try for myself
the high seas, the flow of salt streams;   35
my heart’s desire urges my spirit
time and again to travel, so that I might seek
far from here a foreign land.
And so no man on earth is so proud in spirit,
nor so good in gifts or keen in youth,   40
nor so bold in deeds, nor so loyal to his lord,
that he never has sorrow at his seafaring,
when he sees what the Lord has in store for him.
He has no thought of the harp or the taking of rings,
nor the pleasures of women or worldly joy,   45
nor anything else but the tumbling waves —
he always has longing who hastens to sea.
The groves take blossom, fair grow the cities,
the fields brighten, the world rushes on;
all these urge the eager-hearted   50
spirit to travel, when he has a mind
to journey far over the flood-ways.
Even the cuckoo urges with its sad voice,
summer’s guardian announces sorrow
bitter in the breast-hoard. He does not know,   55
the man blessed with ease, what those endure
who walk most widely in the paths of exile.
And so now my thought flies out from my breast,
my spirit across the sea-flood
flies out widely over the whale’s home,   60
to the corners of the earth, and comes back to me
greedy and hungry; the lone flier cries out,
incites my heart ceaselessly to the whale’s path

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^[2] The disjunction between what has come before and what come after this line is so great that it has been proposed that a second speaker is introduced here (there are no quotation marks in Old English that might clarify this ambiguity).
Though this ‘two-speaker’ theory is no longer widely accepted, it reflects the difficulty many critics have reconciling the conflicting attitudes presented in the poem – sea voyage as terrible suffering, sea voyage as longed-for escape
(as in the first chapter of Melville’s Moby-Dick), sea-voyage as metaphor for spiritual pilgrimage, or even for life itself.

over the open sea – and so hotter to me
are the joys of the Lord than this dead life,   65
loaned, on land.^[3] I will never believe
that earthly goods will endure forever.
Always, inevitably, one of three things
hangs in the balance before its due time:
illness or age or attack by the sword   70
wrests life away from one doomed to die.
And so for every man the praise of posterity,
those coming after, is the best eulogy —
that before he must be on his way, he act
bravely on earth against the enemies’ malice,   75
do bold deeds to beat the devil,
so the sons of men might salute him afterwards,
and his praise thereafter live with the angels
forever and ever, in the joy of eternal life,
delight among heaven’s host. The days are lost,   80
and all the pomp of this earthly kingdom;
there are not neither kings nor emperors
nor gold-givers like there once were,
when they did the greatest glorious deeds
and lived in most lordly fame.   85
Fallen is all this noble host, their happiness fled,
the weaker ones remain and rule the world,
get what they can with toil. Joy is laid low,
the earth’s nobility grows old and withers,
just like every man throughout middle-earth.   90
Old age overtakes him, his face grows pale,
the graybeard grieves; he knows his old friends,
offspring of princes, have been given to the earth.
When life fails him, his fleshly cloak will neither
taste sweetness nor touch soreness,   95
nor move a hand nor think with his mind.
Though a brother may wish to strew his brother’s
grave with gold, lay him among the dead

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^[3] At this point the sea-voyage is revealed to be a journey of spiritual discovery, as in the Hiberno-Latin Voyage of St Brendan.
The hermit-monks of Ireland had a particular penchant for taking to small boats and trusting in God for their safety.
Some reached Iceland, some are rumored to have reached the Americas; many others, no doubt, found rest at the bottom of the sea.

with many treasures to take with him,
that gold will be useless before the terror of God   100
for the soul that is full of sin,
the gold he has hidden while he lived here on earth.
Great is the terror of God, the earth trembles before it;
He established the sturdy foundations,
the earth’s solid surface and the high heavens.   105
Foolish is he who fears not the Lord; death will find him unprepared.
Blessed is he who lives humbly; that mercy comes to him from heaven,
the Maker establishes that mind in him, for he believes in His might.
A man must steer a strong mind and keep it stable,
steadfast in its promises, pure in its ways;   110
every man must hold in moderation
his love for a friend and his hatred for a foe,
though he may wish him full of fire…
…or his friend consumed
on a funeral pyre.^[4] Fate is greater,   115
the Maker mightier than any man’s thoughts.
Let us consider where we should have our home,^[5]
and then think how we might come there,
and let us also strive to reach that place
of eternal blessedness,   120
where life is found in the love of the Lord,
hope in heaven. Thanks be to the Holy one
that he has so honored us, Ruler of glory,
eternal Lord, throughout all time. Amen.

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^[4] Something is missing from the manuscript here; the translation is conjectural and makes as little sense as the original.
^[5] The tone of these last lines, different in many respects from the rest of the poem, seem to place the poem finally in a homiletic setting – the exhortation of a preacher rather than the confession of a weathered Ancient Mariner.