Following these principles, the translators have attempted to reproduce for modern English readers the meaning and movement of the Old English originals. It is their earnest hope that something of the fine spirit that breathes through much of this poetry will be found to remain in the translation.
[Critical edition: R. W. Chambers, _Widsith: a Study in Old English Heroic Legend_. Cambridge, 1912.
Date: Probably late sixth or early seventh century.
Alliterative translation: Gummere, _Oldest English Epic_ (1910), p. 191.
"Widsith--'Farway'--the ideal wandering minstrel, tells of all the tribes among whom he has sojourned, of all the chieftains he has known. The first English students of the poem regarded it as autobiographical, as the actual record of his wanderings written by a _scop_; and were inclined to dismiss as interpolations passages mentioning princes whom it was chronologically impossible for a man who had met Ermanric to have known. This view was reduced to an absurdity by Haigh.
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"The more we study the growth of German heroic tradition, the more clear does it become that _Widsith_ and _Deor_ reflect that tradition. They are not the actual outpourings of actual poets at the court of Ermanric or the Heodenings. What the poems sung in the court of Ermanric were like we shall never know: but we can safely say that they were unlike _Widsith_.... The Traveller's tale is a fantasy of some man, keenly interested in the old stories, who depicts an ideal wandering singer, and makes him move hither and thither among the tribes and the heroes whose stories he loves. In the names of its chiefs, in the names of its tribes, and above all in its spirit, _Widsith_ reflects the heroic age of the migrations, an age which had hardly begun in the days of Ermanric."--Chambers, p. 4.
Lines 75, 82-84 are almost certainly interpolated. With these rejected "the poem leaves upon us," says Chambers, "a very definite impression. It is a catalogue of the tribes and heroes of Germany, and many of these heroes, though they may have been half legendary already to the writer of the poem, are historic characters who can be dated with accuracy."]
Note.--In the footnotes, no attempt is made to discuss peoples or persons mentioned in this poem unless they are definitely known and are of importance for an understanding of the meaning of the lines.