The Wanderer

Long before the Medieval era, the epic literatures of Antiquity defined a hero as a brave, selfless, and noble larger-than-life figure, typically of great physical dimension and outstanding military acumen. Hercules, Achilles, Odysseus, Jason, and Perseus, to name the most familiar to contemporary readers, were courageous and cunning. They were tested by tribulations, overcoming dire odds. Favored by the gods themselves, they led their armies to victories of epochal proportions—victories, in turn, worth commemorating in grand poetry.

The Wanderer, however, defines a far different kind of hero, something of an anti-hero. The Wanderer himself is a failure. His cause is lost, his nation slaughtered, and he grapples with an awareness of that defeat. He is now alone, an outsider. As John Richardson (1988) argues, the Wanderer is caught between two worlds (See: Further Reading & Resources). He is doomed to be a survivor, adrift in a hostile world in which everything he has known is gone. Grizzled, tight-lipped, solitary, the Wanderer finds refuge only in stoicism. He refuses to concede to a hard and cold world beyond his control. That refusal to surrender to the logic of despair defines the anti-hero’s courage.

A millennium later, that character in part defines the familiar existential anti-hero of 20th-century film and literature, most notably Ernest Hemingway’s World War I survivors Jake Barnes and Robert Jordan; John Ford’s Ethan Edwards (The Searchers); Clint Eastwood’s Will Munny (The Unforgiven); any of the tormented wandering samurai in the early films of Akira Kurasawa; J.