The wanderer, however, is utterly isolated by such suspicions.

It should be clear even from this brief utterance of the wanderer how essential the comitatus was to an individual's sense of identity and the practicalities of day-to-day living during the time in which the poem was written, but "The Wanderer" illustrates the importance of this relationship to its society on an even deeper. The comitatus was viewed in many ways as emblematic of the way life, history, and the world works, showing the fundamentally different perspective that such a way of life instills. The wanderer reflects on "how ghostly it will be when all the wealth of this world stands waste...Wine-halls totter, the lord lies bereft of joy, all the company has fallen, bold men beside the wall" (113). In the proven inevitability of separation from one's lord, the wanderer sees reflected the inevitability of history wiping away all of...
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