Anmerkungen zur nautisch-maritimen Symbolik im altenglischen Gedicht "The Seafarer"

Abstract

An example of native-language literature of the early Middle Ages, "The Seafarer" is a poem based on a seafaring population’s experiences and realities of life. In an additive manner, the work combines various motifs and strands of lore from non-Christian and Christian antiquity as well as from the Irish-Celtic tradition. The author moreover arrived at a complex texture through the creation of various levels of abstraction which nonetheless closely interweave the very different sections of the poem. The symbols and images of maritime life running through the work occupy an exceptional position in the Old English and European literature of the period in question. The range of levels of meaning would have provided the contemporary reader or listener with various means of access to the text, and were perhaps intended to do so. In analogy to heathen literature of antiquity, and despite formal differences, the "Seafarer" can also be read as a Christian "Periplus", a sea voyage at the end of which - after all the storms and dangers of shipwreck, the nemeses with which this-worldly life on the seas is constantly threatened - the soul reaches the safety of the home port in God’s realm.