ABSTRACT
In turning from ruins to wilderness and the Old English narratives of Guthlac, I continue an exploration of how Anglo-Saxon literary and documentary texts constructed lived places and the spaces contiguous to them, and what cultural contexts those constructions reveal. Saint Guthlac withdraws to an island containing a ruined structure, once a grave, later a cistern; I discuss that in this chapter rather than with the previous examples of ruins because of the way the ruin intersects with constructions of wilderness and the people who live in supposed wildernesses, as well as with the ways in which the Guthlac narratives anticipate much later colonizing invasions.
