Waldere

"Waldere" or "Waldhere" is the conventional title given to two Old English fragments, of around 32 and 31 lines, from a lost epic poem, discovered in 1860 by E. C. Werlauff, Librarian, in the Danish Royal Library at Copenhagen, where it is still preserved. The parchment pages had been reused as stiffening in the binding of an Elizabethan prayer book, which had presumably come to Europe following the Dissolution of the Monasteries in England in the 16th century.

==Overview== The portion that was found was a part of a much larger work. What remains of the poem comes in two parts, written on two separate single leaves, usually called “fragment I” and “fragment II”, and generally dated about 1000. The date of the poem's composition is unknown.