Deor

Placing this poem within a genre has proven to be quite difficult. Some commentators attempting to characterise the work have called it an ubi sunt ("where are they?") poem because of its meditations on transience. It can also be considered a traditional lament and poem of consolation. Christian consolation poems, however, usually attempt to subsume personal miseries in a historical or explicitly metaphysical context (e.g., Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy), and such perspectives are somewhat remote from the tradition of Anglo-Saxon poetry. Medievalist scholars who have viewed the poem within the Anglo-Saxon tradition have therefore seen it primarily as a begging poem—a poem written by a travelling and begging poet who is without a place at a noble court—although because few other begging poems survive, assigning it to such a genre is somewhat speculative. Others have related "Deor" to other melancholy poems in the Exeter Book, such as "The Seafarer" and "The Wanderer". Richard North has argued that the poem was written in about 856 as a satire on King Æthelwulf of Wessex. John Miles Foley has hypothesized that the apparent murkiness of "Deor" is also in no small part attributable to the obscurity of the poet's references. As he puts it, "Cut off from its traditional background, 'Deor' makes little sense". Because the poem is not entirely translatable into modern English—the third and fourth stanzas remain indeterminate to this day, and even the refrain prompts argument and poses linguistic difficulties—without grasping the allusions of the poem, it is quite difficult to understand the poet's implied attitude, and therefore to place it in any genre satisfactorily. Further, given the mass loss of Anglo-Saxon literature, it is possible that constraining the poem to an existing genre is artificial, for the poem may represent yet another, otherwise unattested genre, or it might well stand alone outside of generic rules. ==Summary==

recites poetry to harp accompaniment "Deor" is a lament in the voice of a poet exiled from his former life of luxury, respect, and popularity. He compares his current predicament to the predicaments of figures from stories traditional in medieval Germanic-speaking culture. The first twenty-seven lines of the poem present five vignettes, alluding to traditional stories and separated by a refrain (for which there is no close parallel elsewhere in Old English poetry) which says "" (usually translated "that passed over, so may this"). Although the precise significance of this refrain is debated, it clearly indicates that the misfortunes described in each vignette were eventually overcome. Four of the five vignettes mention characters well known from stories associated with Theodoric the Great, but it is unclear what the other is alluding to. Partly for this reason, many scholars have assumed that there is no narrative thread running through the poem. in particular, Jennifer Lorden has argued that the vignettes trace the career of Widia as most clearly attested in the Old Norse Þiðreks saga. Numerous other interpretations exist, including that the vignette is part of a well integrated narrative sequence and concerns Niðhad. Heorrenda (Hjarrandi) was also one of the names of the god Odin. ==Literary influence==

"Deor" had a profound influence on J. R. R. Tolkien, the refrain in particular—which he himself translated as "Time has passed since then, this too can pass"—decline and fall in Middle-earth being, according to Tom Shippey, a central theme of The Lord of the Rings. == See also ==