(ca. eighth century)
Perhaps the best-known of the religious poems and sermons that make up the 10th-century OLD ENGLISH manuscript called the VERCELLI BOOK, The Dream of the Rood is a DREAM VISION (the oldest such poem in English), in which a speaker relates a remarkable dream wherein the rood, the cross on which Christ was crucified, takes life and speaks. The poem begins as the narrator describes his vision of a gold-bedecked cross that tells the dreamer its life story: Born in a forest, the cross was cut down and transformed into an instrument of torture. Christ, depicted in the poem as a bold young warrior who mounts the cross of his own will as an act of courage, is hung upon it. The cross describes its desire to defend Christ against those who want to kill him, but is prevented from doing so. It laments bitterly the way the crowd mocked both of them—himself and Christ. Thus Christ is pictured as an Anglo-Saxon warrior lord, and the cross as one of his retainers, bound by Germanic custom to defend his lord and avenge his death. Christ is buried, as is the cross, but it is later found, resurrected as it were, by St.Helene, and now it has its place in glory. Just as Mary redeemed womankind after Eve’s fall, so the cross has redeemed all trees after the first tree’s fruit damned mankind. And now, the cross tells the dreamer, all may be saved because of him who suffered on the rood. It commands the dreamer to tell others of his vision. The poem ends as the speaker, inspired by the good news of the dream, prays joyfully and with new hope to the King of Glory, with whom he hopes to spend eternity because of what the cross has told him.
It appears that The Dream of the Rood was a well-known poem in its own day, and that it likely predates the manuscript in which it is preserved. Parts of the rood’s speech appear carved in runic letters on the famous Ruthwell Cross, now at Dumfries in southern Scotland, a cross produced in the early eighth century.The silver reliquary known as the Brussels Cross, made to hold a piece of the true cross sent to Alfred the Great by Pope Marinus in 884, also is inscribed with a quotation from The Dream of the Rood. These references suggest that the poem may have been known and circulating as early as the eighth century. Alternatively, they may suggest that the poem was a redaction of an earlier original quoted in the runic inscription, or that the poet incorporated the earlier inscribed verses into his own work. Having an inanimate object speak is a device typical of Old English RIDDLES. The Germanic elements of the poem also extend, as mentioned, to the depiction of Christ and of the cross itself, which ironically, as a Germanic retainer, can only obey its lord by not defending him. But the poem is thoroughly Christian as well, and may be the best available illustration of the blending of the two cultures in Anglo-Saxon England.
Bibliography
■ Alexander, Michael. The Earliest English Poems. 3rd ed. New York: Penguin, 1991.
■ Clemoes, Peter. “King and Creation at the Crucifixion: The Contribution of Native Tradition to the ‘Dream of the Rood’ 50-6a,” in Heroes and Heroines in Medieval English Literature, edited by Leo Carruthers. Cambridge: Brewer, 1994, 31–43.
■ Fleming, John. “The Dream of the Rood and Anglo- Saxon Monasticism,” Traditio 22 (1966): 43–72.
■ Krapp, George E., ed. The Vercelli Book. Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records 2. New York: Columbia University Press, 1932.
■ Pigg, Daniel. “ ‘The Dream of the Rood’ in Its Discursive Context: Apocalypticism as Determinant of Form and Treatment,” English Language Notes 29, no. 2 (June 1992): 13–22.