farer, Line 8). At others, he celebrates it: “...Even now my heart / Journeys beyond its confines, and my thoughts / Over the sea, across the whale's domain, / Travel afar the regions of the earth, / And then come back to me with greed and longing. / The cuckoo cries, incites the eager breast / On to the whale’s roads irresistibly, / Over the wide expanses of the sea,” (The Seafarer, Line 58). In Anglo-Saxon society a warrior believed in lof: he received glory by his valor in battle; his accomplishments in life. If his deeds were sufficiently notable his name would live on long after he died, granting him immortality. The Seafarer believes that “Sickness, old age, the sword, each one of these/ May end the lives of doomed and transient men. / Therefore for every warrior the best / Memorial is the praise of living men ” (The Seafarer, Line 68). Halfway through the poem we see a drastic turn. Part A has mentioned almost nothing spiritual, only speaking of the hard life of a man who lives at sea. In the beginning of part B, in line 64b, however, he changes his thus far Anglo-Saxon tone to that of a pious Christian: “Because the joys of God mean more to me / Than this dead transitory life on land.”The conversion of Anglo-Saxon England was relatively quick. It went from a culture which had a comitatus conscience to one that was dominated by an individual, Christian conscience. Even during his musings on God, the speaker still laments “The singing gull instead of mead in hall” (The Seafarer, 23), the loss of “dear friends,” (The Seafarer, 15), and the lord he once had. At times it seems like the poet is attempting to reconcile the tensions between the two different cultures. In one of the first know criticisms of the poem, Max Rieger in 1869 postulated that the poem is of one writer and speaks of a dialogue between two individuals; an eager young sailor and an old...
