Editing Deor (section)

==Genre==
Placing this poem within a genre has proven to be quite difficult. Some commentators attempting to characterise the work have called it an ''[[ubi sunt]]'' ("where are they?") poem because of its meditations on [[wikt:transience|transience]]. It can also be considered a traditional [[lament]] and poem of consolation.  Christian consolation poems, however, usually attempt to subsume personal miseries in a historical or explicitly metaphysical context (e.g., [[Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius|Boethius]]'s ''[[Consolation of Philosophy]]''), and such perspectives are somewhat remote from the tradition of Anglo-Saxon poetry.  Medievalist scholars who have viewed the poem within the Anglo-Saxon tradition have therefore seen it primarily as a begging poem—a poem written by a travelling and begging poet who is without a place at a noble court—although because few other begging poems survive, assigning it to such a genre is somewhat speculative. Others have related "Deor" to other melancholy poems in the Exeter Book, such as "[[Seafarer (poem)|The Seafarer]]" and "[[The Wanderer (Old English poem)|The Wanderer]]". Richard North has argued that the poem was written in about 856 as a satire on King [[Æthelwulf of Wessex]].<ref>{{cite journal|url=http://www.oenewsletter.org/OEN/archive/OEN29_2.pdf|journal=Old English Newsletter|title=Deor|publisher=Western Michigan University|volume=29|number=2|date=Winter 1996|issn=0030-1973|pages=35–36}}</ref>

[[John Miles Foley]] has hypothesized that the apparent murkiness of "Deor" is also in no small part attributable to the obscurity of the poet's references. As he puts it, "Cut off from its traditional background, 'Deor' makes little sense".<ref>Foley, John Miles. ''Homer's Traditional Art''. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1999.</ref>  Because the poem is not entirely translatable into modern English—the third and fourth stanzas remain indeterminate to this day, and even the refrain prompts argument and poses linguistic difficulties—without grasping the allusions of the poem, it is quite difficult to understand the poet's implied attitude, and therefore to place it in ''any'' genre satisfactorily.  Further, given the mass loss of Anglo-Saxon literature, it is possible that constraining the poem to an existing genre is artificial, for the poem may represent yet another, otherwise unattested genre, or it might well stand alone outside of generic rules.