thumb|First lines of "Widsith"

"Widsith" (, "far-traveller", lit. "wide-journey"), also known as "The Traveller's Song", is an Old English poem of 143 lines. It survives only in the Exeter Book (pages 84v–87r), a manuscript of Old English poetry compiled in the late-10th century, which contains approximately one-sixth of all surviving Old English poetry. "Widsith" is located between the poems "Vainglory" and "The Fortunes of Men". Since the donation of the Exeter Book in 1076, it has been housed in Exeter Cathedral in southwestern England. The poem is for the most part a survey of the people, kings, and heroes of Europe in the Heroic Age of Northern Europe.

Date of composition

Among the works appearing in the Exeter Book, there are none quite like "Widsith", and there is some controversy as to when "Widsith" was first composed.

In the second half of the twentieth century, several historians, prominently including John Niles, Joyce Hill, Norman Blake and Bernard Muir, argued that the work was composed in the ninth or tenth century to evoke a glorious past for people in England, and that its author(s) and audiences may have known little about the people and peoples named. In his 1962 edition, Kemp Malone assembled linguistic evidence that "Widsith" took more or less the form that survives in the Exeter Book in the Anglian dialect of Old English by the beginning of the eighth century, arguing that the poem was a close reflection of traditions arising during the Migration Period. This view accrued new support in the twenty-first century. In 2011 the archaeologist Lotte Hedeager argued that "Widsith" goes back to Migration Period-history—at least part of it was composed in the 6th century—and that the author demonstrates familiarity with regions outside of Britain, including Denmark and the Baltic coast. and Malone's dating was accepted in 2025 by Ian Shiels. Historically, we know that one speaker could not travel to see all of these nations in one lifetime. In a similar vein, "I was with the Lidwicingas, the Leonas, and the Langobards", Widsith boasts,

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with heathens and heroes and with the Hundingas.

I was with the Israelites and with the Assyrians,

with the Hebrews and the Indians, and with the Egyptians...

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The forests of the Vistula in the ancient writing tradition (Widsith, v. 121) are the homeland of the Goths, the material remains of which are generally associated with the Wielbark Culture.

The poem that is now similarly titled "Deor", also from the Exeter Book, draws on similar material.

Tribes of Widsith

The list of kings of tribes is sorted by "fame and importance", according to Hedeager, with Attila of the Huns coming first, followed immediately by Eormanric of the Ostrogoths; by contrast, the Byzantine emperor is number five.

Leonard Neidorf proposes a connection between the contents of Widsith and the Germanic deity Woden.

See also

  • List of Germanic tribes

Notes

References

  • Anglo-Saxon poetry: an anthology of Old English poems tr. S. A. J. Bradley. London: Dent, 1982 (translation into English prose).
  • Chambers, R. W. (Ed.). Widsith: A study in Old English heroic legend. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1912.
  • Malone, Kemp (Ed.). Widsith. Rosenkilde and Bagger: Copenhagen, 1962.
  • Neidorf, Leonard. "The Dating of Widsith and the Study of Germanic Antiquity." Neophilologus 97 (2013): pp.&nbsp;165–83.
  • Weiskott, Eric. "The Meter of Widsith and the Distant Past." Neophilologus 99 (2015): pp.&nbsp;143–150.
  • Foys, Martin et al. Old English Poetry in Facsimile Project (Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2019-); digital facsimile edition and Modern English translation
  • Old English text, digitised from George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie (eds), The Exeter Book, The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936)
  • The original text of the verse with a translation.
  • A Verse Translation by Douglas B. Killings
  • Norton Anthology of English Literature on-line: "The linguistic and literary contexts of Beowulf"