Exeter Book in the context of "Exeter Cathedral"

"Widsith" (Old English: Wīdsīþ, "far-traveller", lit. "wide-journey"), also known as "The Traveller's Song", is an Old English poem of 143 lines. It survives only in the Exeter Book (pages 84v–87r), a manuscript of Old English poetry compiled in the late-10th century, which contains approximately one-sixth of all surviving Old English poetry. "Widsith" is located between the poems "Vainglory" and "The Fortunes of Men". Since the donation of the Exeter Book in 1076, it has been housed in Exeter Cathedral in southwestern England. The poem is for the most part a survey of the people, kings, and heroes of Europe in the Heroic Age of Northern Europe.

"Vainglory" is the title given to an Old English gnomic or homiletic poem of eighty-four lines, preserved in the Exeter Book. The precise date of composition is unknown, but the fact of its preservation in a late tenth-century manuscript gives us an approximate terminus ante quem.

The poem is structured around a comparison of two basic opposites of human conduct; on the one hand, the proud man, who “is the devil's child, enwreathed in flesh” (biþ feondes bearn / flæsce bifongen), and, on the other hand, the virtuous man, characterised as "God’s own son" (godes agen bearn).

"The Fortunes of Men", also "The Fates of Men" or "The Fates of Mortals", is the title given to an Old English gnomic poem of 98 lines in the Exeter Book, fols. 87a–88b.