Topic: Certain motifs, or recurring ideas, such as the journey, exile, and fate, appear frequently in many Anglo-Saxon works. What recurrent motifs have you found in the two works? Cite evidence to support your answers.
Two pieces of Anglo-Saxon literature are The Seafarer and The Wife’s Lament. Both pieces have unknown writers, but known translators. Exile is a motif in both pieces of literature. Both of the narrators were abandoned in some way, and were forced to live on their own, and deal with the sadness of being exiled on their own. Although they do have this in common, there are other motifs that they do not have in common.
In The Seafarer, the recurring ideas that I noticed were exile, journey, and fate. In lines 19 and 20, the narrator says that “The only sound was the roaring sea, the freezing waves.” This shows the exile. The narrator was completely alone, and the only noise he/she heard was the nature surrounding him/her. In line 30, the narrator says that he “put himself back on the paths of the sea." In line 36, the narrator states that “the time for journeys would come…” These quotes show the journey and travel, both mental and physical, that was occurring. In line 103, the narrator states that “we all fear God.” “He turns the earth, he set it swinging firmly in space, gave life to the world and light to the sky,” he said in lines 103 to 105. In lines 115 and 116, he says “Fate is stronger and God mightier than any man’s mind.” These quotes show the recurring idea of fate. It shows the idea that God controls all, and that the things that happen are predetermined.
In The Wife’s Lament, a few recurring ideas are exile, loss, and grief. In line five, the narrator says “I ever suffered grief through banishment.” This line leads us to believe that the narrator was filled with sadness because she was abandoned, or exiled. She then goes on to tell, in lines 11 to 14, of how her husband’s family betrayed their love. “My husband’s kinsman plotted secretly how they might separate us from each other that we might live in wretchedness apart most widely in the world: and my heart longed.” This woman lost her husband because of his family. She suffered a large amount of grief because of her being exiled from her husband and his family.