Waldere or Waldhere is the conventional title given to two Old English fragments 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. The Dissolution of the Monasteries had brought quantities of unregarded manuscripts into the English 16th-century market.
The portion that was found was a part of a much bigger 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. Waldere was first edited by George Stephens (Copenhagen, 1860), afterwards by R. Wulker in Bibliothek der angel-sächsischen Poesie (vol. 1, Cassel, 1881); then by Peter Holthausen in Göteborgs högskolas årsskrift (vol. 5, 1899), with autotype reproductions of the two leaves which have been preserved. The first main translation of Waldere was by Frederick Norman in 1933 and the second by Arne Zettersten in 1979. Both are accompanied by commentary. A critical edition by Jonathan B. Himes appeared in 2009.