ABSTRACT
For, a place that speaks to the people, a place from which they seek and garner permission, is both invoking and also paying inadvertent obeisance to their ancestors, to all those of the people group who came before them. Today, the people have such relationships soldered for the reader through print—in the form of histories, holy books, biographies, philosophy tracts. The Anglo-Saxons certainly understood the heavy anguish of this phenomenon. In the anonymous “The Wanderer,” a song whose pedigree dates back to preliterate culture, its speaker acknowledges being seledreorig, which literally translates as “hall-sad”. The medievalist Eric Jager enticingly refers to the expression exhibited in this oral Germanic tradition as being even more specifically pectoral—which is to say, chest-centered no less than mouth-centered. Nowhere, perhaps, is the polyphonic significance of the scop to Anglo-Saxon culture made more apparent than in the passage that follows this deep unlocking.
