Déor

I love how personal this poem is. Or at least how personal it feels. Even if one has no idea who the people are that it names, I think the basic message comes through very clearly, although it has been over a thousand years since it was written.

The way the poet uses the mythical and historical characters as models of how patient (or less patient) endurance can remedy even the very worst of situations, comparing their situations at the end of each verse to ðisses (this), leads the reader to assume that the poem aims to comfort readers who are greatly affected by some terrible calamity, already known to both reader and poet.

The last part of the poem uncovers the nature of the calamity and creates a sense of bathos, as it turns out the calamity is less life-or-death, and not really something that affects the reader at all, but more of a personal disaster. They have lost their high-status job. There is a humorous touch in the reveal. The poet has deliberately set themselves up in parallel to great heroes like Theodoric the Goth and Wayland Smith, but they are merely a working poet, with no great deeds to their name. (They use the same word, ahte, to describe their holding of land-rights that they used for both Theodoric and Eormanric’s kingdoms.) And they are not facing enemies with swords, but simply a loss of status and income. The contrast is amusing. It is very Life of Brian (Jones, 1979), or possibly Cohen the Barbarian (Pratchett, 1986).

At the same time as introducing this humour, though, the poet gets deeply personal, sharing their name, their distress, and their hopes. I find this genuinely moving, regardless of whether the actual poet is the character who is speaking in the first person here or not. And losing a job might be a terrible personal disaster for a poet. Without a patron, what are they going to live on? They have given their entire working life to being a great poet, and they have just lost both their income and their audience.

I feel that the poet is simultaneously using the contrast to help themselves develop a sense of proportion about their own situation and to express how devastating it feels to them. It feels very human.

The humour returns in the last line. In all the previous stanzas, when the difficulty passes over, this means someone has encountered violent revenge. The same words are used here, and the implication seems clear: a sly implied wish that the poet’s replacement (and possibly the faithless lord) will encounter some sort of vengeance for the situation Déor has been reduced to.

Or possibly we are only meant to take the more obvious meaning from the last line — a comforting ‘this too shall pass’ that suggests we should not take anything too much to heart.

When I first read this poem, I had had no idea that poets from that long ago wrote personal works. It felt startlingly modern to me. I had thought all medieval and earlier poetry was storytelling, like Beowulf or the Epic of Gilgamesh. Finding someone so long ago sharing personal feelings, especially when the sole purpose of the poem appeared to be about sharing those feelings, was an amazing moment for me. The humour of the poem was also eye-opening. Apparently people in the early Middle Ages found contrasts like this just as funny as Tolkien did when he wrote Farmer Giles of Ham (1949), or as Jane Austen did when she had Catherine explore Northanger Abbey (1817), looking for Gothic romance and finding laundry bills.

We have no evidence for whether Déor the poet ever existed. The person who wrote the poem could be Déor, could be using a historical figure, or may have made Déor up completely.

(Talking with my brother about the circumstances in which the poem could have been composed, it became obvious that there is every chance the poet was a monk, using the character of a fictional or traditional scop to talk about their very real feelings of loss and disempowerment in some loss of role within their own world. I find this very convincing, although there is obviously no evidence for it beyond the use of the Heodenings and Heorrenda, who are attested in other works as having existed, if at all, at a much earlier time.)

It doesn’t matter. Déor remains startlingly human, amusing, sad, and intimate.

From the Exeter Book (fol. 100r–v), a manuscript gifted to Exeter Cathedral by Leofric (died 1072 CE), transcribed and translated by Maire Smith, 2025

Who are the people in the poem?

Wayland (Old English Weland and Old Norse Völundr) is a magical smith, the hero of a story that appears in many Germanic languages. Captured by his enemy, Niðhad (nið in Old English means is ‘evil/enmity’), hamstrung, and forced to work for his captors, he decapitated Niðhad’s two sons and made their skulls into goblets, as well as raping his daughter, Beadohild, before flying away (either through magical powers or with wings that he has made for himself). His story is illustrated on the left half of the front of the Franks Casket.

Old English wurm translates into the two Modern English words, worm and dragon. I have used the fantasy literature form, wyrm, which I feel captures both of these meanings better than any other Modern English term. Some critics believe that the term refers to swords or blades in this poem. There is also confusion about the exact meaning of the line about sinew-bonds. Bosworth-Toller has the meaning with a question mark and notes that at least one other authority thinks bende is a scribal error for benne . The interpretation I’ve gone for, that the bond is a metaphorical one in the form of weak sinews, is my own. It fits with the myth, and with Bosworth-Toller’s option of ‘weak or feeble’ for swoncre.

Wayland’s situation is solved through his own genius and magical powers, so the poem starts on a fairly upbeat note; Wayland’s troubles were overcome, and so may be the troubles of the narrator. This is tempered by the recognition that Wayland’s overcoming of his woes devastated others (Beadohild). 

Little is known of the rest of the story of Mæðhild (Matilda) and Geat, although nineteenth century Scandinavian ballads (Eliason, 1965) apparently suggest that it was a tragedy and the resolution of the story may have involved the creation of musical instruments using the body of the dead Mæðhild, in a manner similar to that told of in the traditional song O the Wind and Rain (Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band, 1988). This is a less happy ending, but it still suggests that distressing situations may contain intrinsic merit that need only recognised or exploited.

Theodoric the Goth (454–526), king of the Ostrogoths, was an actual historical person, and is generally identified in Germanic stories as the same character as Dietrich von Bern. The stories place him as contemporary with the Gothic king Eormanric (died 376) as well as Attila the Hun (died 453), so it is possible that at least some of the stories are about another Theodoric or Dietrich. His defence of the Maering stronghold is not otherwise recorded, but Eormanric is said in the Book of Bern (late thirteenth century) to have invaded Bern and exiled Theodric. Theodoric’s defence ending with Eormanric’s conquest is hardly a positive image, given what we are then told of Eormanric’s reign. The theme of these two stanzas seems to be that while long-lasting defences of positions will naturally pass away, so will the evils of what follows. While nothing good lasts, neither does the less good.

Finally, in the last stanza we find out what the narrator’s sitation is. The Heodenings are a Germanic tribe, mentioned in the Prose Edda (as the Heðinn) and Heorrenda also appears in the Prose Edda, as Hjarrandi, so it seems possible that this poem has been passed down through an oral tradition or written about an historical character, rather than being by the narrator himself, as first seems probable. However, there is no firm evidence either way.

The manuscript

The manuscript of the Exeter Book is beautifully written and surprisingly easy to read with just a little effort. The first letter is a wyn — the rune that is used in Old English texts where we would use W. The Þ symbol is called thorn, and it sounds like TH. Ð/ð is eth, which also sounds like TH. The lower case s’s look like long modern r’s. Some of the words are abbreviated, like sumū, for sumum, a symbol a bit like a 7 for &, and a merged þ and t symbol for þæt.