ABSTRACT
Deor, copied into six little prose blocks in the Exeter Book, is clearly a poem that refers to heroic legends. It is usually read as a sad poem, in line with the four named and one unnamed melancholy situations that are cited by Deor, the persona: Weland’s captivity, Beadohild’s pregnancy, Geat’s frustrated love, Theodric’s 30-year exile and the sufferings of mad King Eormanric’s many subjects; and then a man who looks like the prisoner Boethius, waiting for Philosophy rather than death in his cell. Each time, however, we are assured (unusually in a refrain) that this suffering will pass.
