Deor

For the character in J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium, see Déor.

"Deor" (or "The Lament of Deor") is an Old English poem found in the late 10th century collection^[1] the Exeter Book. The poem consists of the lament of the scop Deor, who lends his name to the poem, which was given no formal title; modern scholars do not actually believe Deor to be the author of this poem.

In the poem, Deor's lord has replaced him. Deor mentions various figures from Germanic mythology and reconciles his own troubles with the troubles these figures faced, ending each section with the refrain "that passed away, so may this." The poem Deor begins with the struggles and misfortunes of a character named Weland. The poem consists of 42 alliterative lines.

Genre

Attempts at placing this poem within a genre have proven to be quite difficult. Some commentators attempting to characterise the work have called it an ubi sunt ("where are they?") poem because of its meditations on transience. It can also be considered a traditional lament and poem of consolation. Christian consolation poems, however, usually attempt to subsume personal miseries in a historical or explicitly metaphysical context (e.g., Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy), and such perspectives are somewhat remote from the tradition of Anglo-Saxon poetry. Medievalist scholars who have viewed the poem within the Anglo-Saxon tradition have therefore seen it primarily as a begging poem—a poem written by a travelling and begging poet who is without a place at a noble court—although because few other begging poems survive, assigning it to such a genre is somewhat speculative. Others have related "Deor" to other melancholy poems in the Exeter Book, such as "The Seafarer" and "The Wanderer". Richard North has argued that the poem was written in about 856 as a satire on King Æthelwulf of Wessex.^[2]

John Miles Foley has hypothesized that the apparent murkiness of "Deor" is also in no small part attributable to the obscurity of the poet's references. As he puts it, "Cut off from its traditional background, 'Deor' makes little sense".^[3] Because the poem is not entirely translatable into modern English—the third and fourth stanzas remain indeterminate to this day, and even the refrain prompts argument and poses linguistic difficulties—without grasping the allusions of the poem, it is quite difficult to understand the poet's implied attitude, and therefore to place it in any genre satisfactorily. Further, given the mass loss of Anglo-Saxon literature, it is possible that constraining the poem to an existing genre is artificial, for the poem may represent yet another, otherwise unattested genre, or it might well stand alone outside of generic rules.

Language

The language in the poetry is highly nuanced, and it is difficult for any translation into Modern English to capture the tensions present in the highly dense and parsimonious wording. The poem runs through a list of legendary figures, asks what happened to them, and then responds with a refrain of "Þæs ofereode, þisses swa mæg" ("that passed away, so may this").

Grammatical difficulties are easily glossed over in most translations: for example, the Anglo-Saxon "þæs" and "þisses" of the refrain are both genitive, not nominative. A more correct and literal translation would read "of that went away, and so may of this"—which is difficult to make sense of in Modern English. Reinserting an elided "it" might render "It (sorrow) went away from that (situation), (and) so it (sorrow) may from this (situation)."

Story

The poem Deor is a lament by its namesake about his exile from his life of luxury, respect, and popularity. He compares his current predicament to the predicaments of figures from Anglo-Saxon folklore. Among the miseries and dismal fates that Deor runs through are those of Theodoric the Great, Ermanaric of the Goths, the mythological smith Wayland, and Wayland's victim Beadohilde (the daughter of Wayland's captor; he raped her and she finds herself with child). Geat and Maethild are more obscure figures, but it has been proposed that their story is the same as that told in the relatively recent medieval Scandinavian ballad known as the Power of the Harp;^[4] variants of this folk ballad from all the Scandinavian nations are known, and in some of these variants the names of the protagonists are Gauti and Magnhild.

Each suffered an undeserved fate, and in each case "that passed away with respect to it, and so may this." But this refrain can point at two very different statements: first, that remedy came about, one way or another, in each situation, or, alternatively, that the continuous flow of time (a favourite Anglo-Saxon topic) erases all pain (though not necessarily healing all wounds).

Only in the last stanza do we learn what "this" references: the poet's own sorrow at having lost his position of privilege. At the poem's conclusion, Deor reveals that he was once a great poet among the Heodenings, until he was displaced and sent wandering by Heorrenda, a more skillful poet. According to Norse mythology, the Heodenings (Hjaðningar) were involved in the never-ending "battle of the Heodenings", the Hjaðningavíg.^[5] Heorrenda (Hjarrandi) was one of the names of the god Odin.

Translation

Weland, the strong man, had experience of persecution; he suffered a lot. Sorrow and longing were his companions, along with exile in the cold winter; he experience misfortunes after Nithad laid constraints upon him, supple bonds of sinew on a better man.