‘He who knows many songs sorrows the less’, claims the poet of the OE Maxims I – and Deor seems to confirm this sentiment. It is a poem of consolation which draws on stock characters of Germanic legend to sketch a series of episodes of misfortune. Each episode is followed by a refrain which may be translated loosely as ‘That passed away, so may this’, and thus the philosophical detachment from the original misfortune allowed by the passage of time is transferred to a present calamity – ‘this’. We do not learn what ‘this’ is until the last section of the poem, where the speaker identifies himself as a scop (professional poet) called Deor, who has been expelled from his position with a great lord in favour of a rival called Heorrenda. The diction of Deor (with nouns such as earfoþ, sorg and wræc, compound adjectives such as winterceald and sorgcearig, and verbs such as drēosan and bidælan) links it very obviously with the other lyrical or elegiac OE poems given in this section – The Wanderer, The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer. Like the poet of The Wanderer (in line 30), the Deor-poet uses the image of sorrow as a companion (line 3).

As a poem in strophic form, with a refrain, Deor is a rarity in OE literature, and the scribe of the Exeter Book has taken note of this, providing a large capital at the start of each section following the refrain. The form is not regular, however.