The effect the two speakers in "The Wanderer" have on a
reader depends largely on the sophistication of the
reader.
Any text written and copied by hand before the
advent of the printing press is a candidate for interpolations. This Anglo-Saxon poem
as we see it today, told orally for generations before it was ever written down, is a
prime candidate.
In other words, the narrator is probably
a character added by a Christian monk who wrote the oral poem down for the first time,
or who copied the poem after some other monk had written it down. The writer or copier
"added his two cents worth," so to speak. The lines attributed to the narrator are
probably lines added to Christianize the text. And this text happens to be the text
that survived.
Notice that the rest of the poem--the
Wanderer's own words--are "pagan," not Christian. They deal with the loss of a way of
life and a man's reaction to the loss of that way of life. The only mention of God's
pity, etc., comes from the narrator. The Wanderer himself battles against fate, and
says nothing about benefiting from God's pity. His way of life has been devastated and
destroyed (Anglo-Saxon life was notoriously unstable), and he is feeling
despair.
No copyright laws existed in Anglo-Saxon England,
of course, and the concept of private ownership of a text wasn't the same then as it is
today. There wasn't anything unethical about a monk Christianizing a text. In fact,
we, today, owe the monks a great deal of gratitude. If not for what appears to be their
open-mindedness and interest in local literature and traditions, we would have few texts
from the period.
Of course, an interpolation-creating monk
could have just been trying to convert the "pagans" by linking traditional poetry to
their Christian message, but whatever the motivation, Anglo-Saxon literature survives,
in part, thanks to well-educated monks.
The narrator, then,
probably doesn't belong, and, thus, you have only one speaker to worry about, rather
than two.
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