Dream of the Rood

notes

The Dream of the Rood is the earliest surviving substantial Christian poem in Old English, and one of the greatest devotional lyrics in any English of any period. Its title translates literally as "The Dream of the Cross" (rood is the Old English word for cross). Fragments of the poem were carved in runes on the Ruthwell Cross, an 18-foot Anglo-Saxon stone cross in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, in the early 8th century. The complete poem — over 150 lines — is preserved in the Vercelli Book, a late 10th-century Anglo-Saxon manuscript that mysteriously found its way to the cathedral library at Vercelli in northern Italy, where it lies still. The poem is a dream-vision. The unnamed dreamer sees a mighty tree, at once bejewelled and bleeding, standing at the corners of the earth. The tree — the Cross itself — then speaks, giving its own account of the crucifixion: how it was cut down, made into an instrument of torture, and against its will chosen to hold Christ; how it trembled when the young hero (Christ figured heroically, in the mode of an Anglo-Saxon warrior-king) mounted it; how they bled together; and how it now bears witness to the salvation it unwillingly helped to accomplish. The theological innovation is remarkable: by figuring Christ as an eager warrior-hero mounting the cross of his own will, and the cross itself as a loyal thane who obeys against his own compassion, the poem reconciles the humiliating scandal of the crucifixion with the heroic ethos of Anglo-Saxon culture. The cross becomes a comrade in Christ's warfare, not an instrument of shame. Translation: Albert S. Cook, "The Dream of the Rood: An Old English Poem," Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905. Public domain.

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