Alienation “The Seafarer”, “The Wanderer”, and “The Wife's Lament” belong in the Exeter Book, which contains manuscripts of Anglo-Saxon poems written between the seventh to twelfth century. During the period when the Anglo-Saxon poems were written, countries were not in good shapes, and politics were unstable because of wars. In such chaos, people either were separated from their love ones, or were in exile. The speakers of “The Seafarer” and “The Wanderer” are both exiled and alone on the sea; in “The Wife's Lament”, the speaker is abandoned by her husband in the woods. Although all three speakers in these poems encountered different situations, they all manage to survive. Alienation impels people to find ways to cope with the pain it brings and to cheer themselves up. While the speaker of “The Seafarer” says he is "Alone in a world blown clear of love" (16), readers can sense that he is …show more content…
Readers are also aware of the speaker being left alone because all his kinsmen and his lord are dead. As a result, he is looking for a new place that will accept him with welcome. The speaker is alienated by the people to whom he seeks refuge from. He is not only alienated by his love ones that hasve been long gone as well, but also death itself, as he is still alive. The speaker finds out that even happy memories hurt him, because they only remind him of being left alone. Since he is not able to forget those memories, he eventually gets wounded repeatedly. The speaker figures out that everything in this world vanishes after some time, the only thing that remains for all times is God. He believes that "It's good to find your grace / in God, the heavenly rock where rests our every hope" (112-113); to him, the only cure to pain is to put his hopes on