Introduction: The Wanderer and Emotional Practice

Summary

Oft ic sceolde ana uhtna gehwylce

mine ceare cwiþan. Nis nu cwicra nan

þe ic him modsefan minne durre

sweotule asecgan. (The Wanderer, lines 8–11a)

Often, alone each dawn, I have had to lament my sorrow.

There is now no-one living to whom I dare clearly speak my heart.

THUS WRITES the anonymous poet of The Wanderer, complaining in the persona of an anhaga or solitary of the lack of anyone to whom he may tell his cares. Ironically, of all expressions of sorrow in Old English, this must be among those most widely heard, for, long after the poet's own time, The Wanderer is a staple of undergraduate Old English courses and has also been the basis of modern artistic reworkings. In recent years, moreover, the question of how to listen to the hearts of the past has received great attention with the immense growth of interest in emotions and their history. The present study offers a contribution to this field. Specifically, it reads a range of Old English literary texts, both heroic and religious and both poetry and prose, in terms of emotional practice. The kind of access texts give us to the emotions of the past reveals not only concepts and representations, though these are important, but also actions, techniques, and social displays: texts like The Wanderer offer tools for complex cognitive, affective and communicative work.

The arguments presented in this book rest on the assumption, on the one hand, that when we talk about ‘emotion’ or ‘emotions’, even though the term is a modern one, we are getting at something fundamental to human experience and ultimately founded in our biology, indeed something we share to some extent with non-human animals. On the other hand, human emotional development takes place in social settings and is profoundly affected by culture, as anthropologists have stressed: it is thus worth thinking about emotions historically. Recent work across humanities and science disciplines has emphasised the functionality of emotions, which are no longer dismissed as irrational or peripheral: they are ‘multi-component responses to challenges or opportunities that are important to the individual's goals, particularly social ones’,5 and they ‘orient us to the world and give us insights, even knowledge, about our place in the world’.