The space of exile in Old English poetry: the journey in Andreas

In the Anglo-Saxon poetic documentation the theme of exile runs through various poems, producing different representations that each time adapt the recurrent elements of a rich and articulate shared heritage of formulas to the specific narrative context. The space of exclusion is generally represented in the contrast between a “here” and an “elsewhere”. In versified texts that reproduce events taken from the Sacred Scriptures this ideal dichotomy takes the forms of the opposition Eden/Earth (Genesis) or heaven/hell (Christ III). In a hagiographic poem like Andreas, reworked by apocryphal sources, the identification of the opposing space “here”/“elsewhere” imposes on the public a constant change of perspective; the apostle, exiled to spread the word of Christ, arrives to a hostile “elsewhere”, but manages to transform it into a “here” through the power of faith.