Sign Cross Dream Rood

Literatim & Theoiogy, Vd 11 No 4, Datmber 1997
THE SIGN OF THE CROSS:

CULTURE AND BELIEF IN THE
DREAM OF THE ROOD
Graham Holderness
Abstract
Two new translations are offered here of the Anglo-Saxon poems 'The
Dream of the Rood* and 'The Seafarer. These translations are prefaced by
a critical introduction which examines then- cultural and theological
contexts.
I
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
T. S. Eliot, Little Gtdding
THE ANGLO-SAXON poem familiarly known as ' The Dream of the Rood
1
or
' The Vision of the Cross' (it has no tide in its manuscript form) occurs in the
'Vercelli Book', Codex CXVII of the cathedral library at Vercelli in Northern
Italy, a compilation of Old English religious verse and prose. The MS dates
from the second half of the tendi century.
1
The poem itself may be consider-
ably older, perhaps seventh century. Unusually for Anglo-Saxon poetry, there
is relatively definite circumstantial evidence bearing upon this poem's date
of composition and cultural location: since a version of the same poem, or
of an older poem from which both examples ultimately derive, is to be found
inscribed in Northumbrian runes on the 'Ruthwell Cross', a carved stone
monument formerly housed within the church of Ruthwell m Dumfreisshire.
The cross could be as old as 670.
2
Additionally some close verbal parallels
occur m a short inscription on the 'Brussels Cross', a silver-laminated wooden
crucifix (probably considered a fragment of the True Cross) which dates
from the late tenth or eleventh centuries.
3
These could derive from the
poem, or again from a common source.
The poem The Dream of the Rood (hereafter Dream), now isolated and
distinguished m scholarly modern editions, and offered here (in one of many
reasonably faithful translations) as a definitive masterpiece of Anglo-Saxon
O Oxford Univeraty Pros 1997
348 THE SIGN OF THE CROSS
poetic artistry, finally therefore derives from a written source, the sophisticated
literary and intellectual context of late West-Saxon Christian culture, the
culture of an already relatively united 'England'.
4
Although the MS is a
compilation of twenty-three homilies and six poems, the homogeneity evid-
ent in its anthology of Christian prose and verse declares some degree of
confidence m both doctrinal and aesthetic categories.
The history of the poem, however, begins (for us) with cryptic inscriptions
carved on a partly 'illegible stone', formulated in the runic alphabet of the
Northumbrian dialect, cohabiting with carved illustrations and extracts from
the Gospels, and with Latin liturgical phrases. The undecorated MS, in its
neat and precise minuscule, rules and standardises its contents in a way that
anticipates the medium of print, and thereby formally excludes much of the
religious iconography, devotional practice and homiletic exhortation so richly
configured on, and entailed in, the practical artistry of the Ruthwell Cross.
'And that,' as T. S. Eliot suggests, 'is where we start.' The question of how
these different variants of the poem mter-relate has given rise to debates
fascinatingly reminiscent of bibliographical struggles over the chronology and
authorship of Shakespeare's plays. Like a 'Bad Quarto' version of a
Shakespeare play, the earlier version of the Dream on the Ruthwell Cross is
cruder, stranger, transparendy more utilitarian, and generally regarded as
aesthetically inferior to its apparendy later, canonical counterpart.
5
The poem
in die Vercelh Book could obviously be a subsequent expansion, elaboration
and sophistication of the earlier form. But such a 'first draft' theory militates
against post-Romantic conceptions of audiorship, and it could seem more
natural to posit an 'original' form of die poem, an 'L/r-Rood' from which all
possible variants can be conjectured to have derived; as hinted by Dickins
and Ross in their edition of the poem:
6
It might be suggested that the Vercelli text goes back to an original poem from
which extracts were carved on the Ruthwell Cross
The co-presence of these textual variants alerts us to the existence of a 'Dream
of the Rood" diat is larger than, and only partially corresponding to, any of
the surviving forms: a body of cultural practice which could be described,
borrowing terms from bibliography, as a 'work' rather than a 'text'.
7
In this
case the 'work' is known to us from those diree material sourcesarchitec-
tural, iconic and literaryas a collation of poetically organised words and
rhythms, devotionally-focused spiritual meditations, and fragmentary traces
of an English Christian liturgy.
Historically, we might say, the Dream existed m a cultural space mapped
between those three surviving objects, and inscribed across those constitutive
cultural elements of stone, metal, wood and parchment. Since we know that
GRAHAM HOLDERNESS 349
the histoncal substance of that 'work' was shared (at least) between an 18-foot
stone monument, a 14 cm silver-laminated wooden icon, and a literary
document, we can further discern the key functions of that 'work', to some
extent disposed across its variant 'texts', as liturgical, devotional and aesthetic.
The 'Rood' that inhabited that cultural space was a cross to be prayed to,
and kissed, as well as a cross to be read.
8
Nor was that cultural space anything like as homogeneous as might be
suggested by searching back from our apparently integrated, canonised
indeed, in some senses 'modernised'
9
Dream of the Rood towards its evidently
discrepant and fragmentary cultural roots. That great Northumbrian kingdom
whose language adorns the Ruthwell Cross, and whose Golden Age produced
such masterpieces of Christian art as the Lindisfarne Gospels, by the time the
Dream was written down no longer existed; and the West Saxon dialect in
which the latter was recorded was the language of those who were, at least
for a brief space in that turbulent period, the historical victors.
10
The surviving traces of that 'work' are those cultural documents, with
their written texts, among which the Dream is the fullest and most impressive
example. Notwithstanding the pre-eminence thus jusdy accorded to the
poem, we would do well, when using it in diis way as the starting-point for
a journey of historical and cultural exploration, to recall that this poetic
address to a relicthe historic Cross employed and left behind by the
Redeemeris itself a relict, a luckily surviving trace, of a substantial corpus
of textual production, emanating from, and shaping, a particular historical
conjuncture of belief, faidi and art.
II
Despite its acknowledged poetic unityRichard Hamer apdy calls it 'the
finest, most imaginatively conceived and most original of the Old English
religious poems'
11
the poem is in some ways a hybrid synthesis of diverse
cultural, religious and poetic discourses. Its formal organisation echoes most
of the different kinds of Anglo-Saxon poetry that we know from surviving
examples: the heroic (e.g. Beowulf), the biblical paraphrase {Christ, Judith),
the saint's life (Elene), the elegy (The Wanderer, The Seafarer), the riddles, and
the specimens of so-called 'gnomic' poetry.
The Dream is famous for its deployment of the language and imagery of
heroic poetry, its sharing of a heroic vocabulary with poems like Beowulf, to
dramatise the Passion of Christ. It contains a narrative which for some distance
follows that of the Gospels, but then traces the subsequent life of the Dreamer,
as does its companion-piece in the Vercelli Book, Elene (the story of the
Emperor Constantine and his modier Helena, legendary discoverer of the
True Cross). In its postulation of human existence as a 'laene life', a life both
transitory and borrowed,
12
lying between a bright lost past and a radiant
anticipated future, the poem shares the spiritual landscape of elegies such as
The Seafarer. Where, in a passage of exhortation, the Cross dwells on the
practical lessons implied by its revelation, we find moral advice of the kind
typical of gnomic poetry. The stylistic personification of the Cross as speaking
subject ('prosopopeia') links it to the riddles, at least two of which have the
Cross as their partial solution.
13
In these respects, the Dream is absolutely of and for its time, its formal
devices deeply embedded in the linguistic registers and cultural vocabularies
deployed by the Anglo-Saxon poets across a wide range of poetic subjects
and styles. Its obvious link with the Ruthwell Cross takes its history back
deep into the very earliest stages of English society, to a point not long after
the arrival of St. Augustine (597). Its medium of alliterative verse sets it
within a cultural process by means of which a Germanic tradition of oral
verse was assimilated to the norms of a monastic literacy originating in the
Mediterranean; or as John C. Pope puts it:
14
Old English poetry is descended from a prehterary stock once common to the
Germanic tribes of the European continent ... Writing as a literary art .. was
introduced among the Anglo-Saxons in the course of die seventh century by
missionaries from the Mediterranean world and from Ireland.
The multi-cultural character of the literature produced from such a rapproche-
ment of traditions is self-evident. It is quite another matter, on the other
hand, to analyse within the literature the precise relations between those
diverse cultural elements, smce the record is already irreversibly translated
into a European literacy that entered England only with the advent of
Christianity. All the Anglo-Saxon poetry we have was documented, if not
actually produced, in the environment of a Christian culture.
The earliest examples of English alliterative verse, for example, are the
hymns of Caedmon, the illiterate cowherd of Whitby who was prompted by
a divine visitation to cast the word of God into the verse of his native tongue.
Bede's account in the Historia Ecdesiastica illustrates both the English language
and the Germanic verse-forms deployed obediently in the service of the
Christian faith. Once Old English verse showed itself capable, m other words,
of revealing through inspiration the word of God, it became worth noting
and writing down (though not, admittedly, by Bede himself).
15
The pagan
traditions from which such poetry originated were, on the other hand, better
discarded, and their verse with them: after all, as Bishop Alcuin put it, ' What
has Ingeld to do with Christ? The eternal king reigns in Heaven, the lost
pagan laments in Hell.'
16
III
The relauonships between Christian and pre-Christian traditions, literacy and
orality, Mediterranean Christianity and Germanic paganism, lie at the heart
of the Dream, and have been central to the history of its critical interpretation.
The poem's religious content in a sense demanded the standard Latin of
biblical, patristic and liturgical Christian literaturecertainly of that Roman
Christianity which established its supremacy over the Celtic variety at the
Synod of Whitby. The vernacular into which, presumably for missionary and
evangelical purposes, that gospel had to be translated, happened to have been
the natural vehicle for a secular literature of pagan heroism.
But the Dream goes much further than utilitarian vernacularisation in its
gathering of Christian and pagan discourses. The poem does actually imagine
the Crucifixion as a heroic battle, depicting Jesus as a 'geong Haeleth' ('young
hero' ), who approaches the challenge of the Passion like an epic hero girding
himself for mortal combat:
It was then that I saw a splendid Saviour
Approach with alacrity and courage to climb.
Hastily, the young hero snipped Hun
For action ... (11.436)
The indignity of the stripping of Christ's raiment in the Passion narrative is
transformed, in the poem, into an eager and athletic stripping for batde. Here
the Crucifixion is no humiliating subjugation: Jesus willingly embraces the
Cross in a trial of strength and courage:
In the sight of spectators,
Feariess and firm, keen for the combat,
He clambered on the cross. (11.479)
In the vocabulary of the Germanic heroic tradition, Christ is depicted not as
a sacrificial lamb led to the slaughter, but as a fighter actively grappling an
opponent:
Widi shocks I shuddered, when the warrior wound
His strong arms about me ... (II.5960)
In death he lies as the finally defeated hero, subjugated yet magnificent in
the scale of his epic achievement, and bitterly mourned by his surviving
retainers:
They took Him up
Tenderly, torn from His torture,
Left me blood-boltered, impaled by the points
Of annihilating nails. They stretched out His limbs,
Wounded, war-weary; stood at His head
To say their good-byes; gneved at his going,
They laid the exhausted hero to rest. (II.8591)
In this way the poem reconstitutes the Passion-narrative into a form quite
different from that encountered in t he Gospels. Wher e the latter tend to
distinguish, by narrative sequencing, the suffering victim from the triumphant
risen God, the Dream by its use of heroic language brings into the Passion a
dimension of epic heroism in action: reckless self-sacrificing bravery, and a
triumph of heroic values even more poignant in defeat than in victory
(although of course in this case, the victory of the Resurrection is implicit
and yet t o come). This certainly looks, prima facie, like cultural assimilation.
As Bruce Mitchell puts it, ' the concept of Christ as a warnor-ki ng' .
17
must have appealed to a people who put such value on ferocious courage and
pnde and who lived according to the comitatus code in which the lord was the
nng-giver and great hero for whom his warriors were duty-bound to die loyally
and without complaint.
IV
As these examples demonstrate, the presence within the poem of a Germani c
warrior-ethic and a language of heroic values is in itself unproblematac. As
one critic puts it, the poem fuses.
18
words and ideas which stem from the Anglo-Saxon world rather than from the
world of the Bible. In the Dream of the Rood, these two traditions are brought
together. Chnst is portrayed as the young hero, reigning from the Cross; but,
at the same time, he is described as cruelly stretched out, weary of limb, enduring
severe torment.
J. C. Pope reminds us, however, that these traditions can be ' brought together'
in quite different ways:
Old English poetry shows at tunes the collision, but often the harmonious
fusion, of Christianity and a submerged paganism, Mediterranean civilization
and a more primitive but not always inferior Germanic world.
19
In what way are these t wo traditions poetically ' brought together' in the
Dream, when they are so obviously and in so many respects entirely i ncom-
patible? Fusion or collision? It is one t hi ng to draw parallels from narratives,
archetypes and symbols in different belief-systems; it is quite another to
reconcile them. Certainly the figure of the heroic warrior can readily express
certain types of divine power. The key role of the Anglo-Saxon lord or king
as dispenser of gifts in return for loyalty and service could easily be assimilated
to the Christian doctrine of grace. Even the death of a pagan hero or king
m battle, and his memonaUsation in ritual, song and poetry, could be seen as
parallel to the death and resurrection of Christ.
But there the resemblances end. The combat undertaken by Jesus has
objectives quite different from those of an Anglo-Saxon raid or battle. It is
not undertaken with a view to achieving political power or securing wealth
through spoil or tribute. It is not a fight to settle a score or fulfil a vow of
vengeance. Victory cannot be rendered visible by the defeat and subjugation
of enemies; nor can the lord's authority be established by generosity m
material rewards. Though Jesus may display Himself to onlookers as courage-
ous ('modig on manigra gesythe, I.41), the success he aims at has a goal more
ambitious than the protection of a community or the defence of a kingdom:
nothing less, indeed, than the universal Redemption of all mankind: ' Tha he
wolde mancyn lyseri (I.41).
In short, this deployment of the Teutomc tradition as a formal vehicle for
a narrative of the Christian Passion tends if anything to polarise rather than
synthesise the alternative cultural perspectives. This is nowhere more apparent
than in the mental torment of the Cross itself, which stoically bears physical
punishment in sympathy with its lord, but endures a sharper pang in the
psychological double-bind of incompatible ethical imperatives. As has been
correctly argued, the Cross sees itself to some degree as a loyal retainer in
the comitatus of Christ.
20
As such his duty is to defend his lord, to struggle
against his lord's enemies, and if necessary to die protecting him. As one
imbued with that heroic ethic, and bound by this high chivalric concept of
nobility in service, the painful destiny of the Cross is to witness in enforced
helplessness his lord's voluntary subjugation.
Though all earth faltered
And flinched with fear, I didn't dare
To bend or to break. I'd have fallen full-length,
Flat to the earth, but was forced to stand firm.
I could have crushed each of those enemies,
But by Christ's command I had to stand fast. (53-8)
Certainly at this point the heroic and triumphalist Christianity that doubdess
appealed to pagan Anglo-Saxons happy to give their loyalty to a sovereign
even greater, more glorious and more generous than those to whom they
were bound on earth, co-exists uneasily with the Pauline doctrine of redemp-
tion through suffering, triumph through passivity.
V
It is necessary at this point to take a step back and to reconsider the relationship
between Christian and heroic traditions. Earlier criticism tended to assume
that the epic strain in the poem belongs to the language of its composition,
and that its heroic values are those of its own Anglo-Saxon social context.
The Dream is very clearly a Northern European poem, its affiliations stretching
outwards towards the territories from which the Germanic settlers brought
their language and their pagan beliefs. But it is equally orentated towards the
Mediterranean source of its Christian tradition and Roman inheritance. It is
of course accurate to link the poem's language of heroic struggle and military
victory to the hegemonic values of Anglo-Saxon society. But the writers
who formulated their contemporary and local applications of an ancient
heroic code knew that synthesis of Christian and pagan-heroic values from
much earlier literary examples.
Though Christianity emerged from a cultural context already nchly sup-
plied with a vocabulary of apocalyptic militarism, its early foundations
developed in contradistinction to Judaism; and it was Rome that enacted the
theological oddity of merging the warnor code of a violent imperialism with
a gospel of peace. While the cult of Jesus clearly derives from the evangehcal
wntmgs of the early Church, especially those of St. Paul, the cult of His
Cross begins some three centuries later, with the story of the Emperor
Constantine's conversion to Christianity. On the eve of the battle at the
Mdvian Bridge in 312, Constantine had a dream or vision of a cross that
assured him victory over Maxentius: 'in hoc signo vinces'. The Cross became,
by adaptation of the existing labarum, the Roman battle-standard; and
Constantine's troops marched to war with the Cross, in Gibbon's words,
'guttering on the helmets, and engraved on the shields of his soldiers'.
21
Christianity became a religion of power and conquest. The Cross was by
these means established as central to the Christian religion; but at the same
time, made synonymous with the weaponry and force majeure of imperial
military power:
Only after the vision of Constantine and his subsequent victory did the Cross
become the universal symbol of Christianity . . No certain representations of
the Crucifixion are found before these events ... henceforth the mystery of the
Crucifixion would be expressed in terms of conquest over foes: 'The cross
which was the justice of thieves' ... says St Augustine ... 'is now become the
sign of glory on the foreheads of emperors.'
22
Together with the Dream in the Vercelh Book is Cynewulf' s poem Elene,
which begins with an account of these events, and provides us with a
fascinating insight into the relations between Christian and heroic values,
since it narrates a story of fourth-century Rome in the combined idioms of
Anglo-Saxon heroic and religious verse. Roman virtus is here formulated in
the language of an English heroic ethic. The Christian Cross is shown arising
from that transhistorical encounter, to become the tutelary protector of both
Roman imperialism and Anglo-Saxon militarism. To Constantine are attrib-
uted all the stock virtues of the Anglo-Saxon warlord:
23
he, the battle-pnnce, was raised up to be army-leader in the kingdom of the
Romans. The protector of his people, valiant with the shield, was gracious
to men.
Embattled to face the Goths and Huns across the Danube, but fearing defeat
from the outnumbering enemy, Constantine is visited in sleep by an angel
who reveals to him a vision of the Cross:
He saw upon the roof of the clouds the glorious cross m its beauty, gleaming
with adornments, decked with gold; gems glittered. The bright tree was inscribed
with letters brilliantly and clearly: 'With this sign shalt thou overcome the enemy
m the perilous onset, thwart the hostile host.'
A cross is constructed and used as a battle-standard, with the predictable result:
The heathen perished; the barbarians fell ... Then it was plain that the King
almighty in that day's work had granted to Constantine victory, glorious honour,
triumph under the heavens, by his rood-tree.
Though the two poems have so much m common, Elene is far more obviously
a heroic and martial narrative than a meditative devotional poem. It is far
less concerned than the Dream with unfolding the Christian mysteries via the
power of dream and prophecy; far more concerned to assimilate Christian
values to the old heroic code, and to demonstrate the irresistible power of
the Cross to subdue the 'heathen'. Just as the Cross was taken into Roman
culture as a symbolic weapon, so in Elene the Cross does not provide a means
of interrogating the heroic ethic, but becomes merely an instrument in
its service.
One very clear link between the Dream and that Roman heroic and
triumphalist Christianity can be found in the Latin hymns of Venandus
Fortunatus (530-609), which are still used in Anglican worship, at the celebra-
tion of Passionode and Good Friday.
24
Though the parallels could be
explained by reference back to a common liturgical source, they are very
close and convincing. ' Vexilla regis' depicts the Cross as a batde-standard, the
crucifixion as a military triumph. Again, where the Passion narrative in the
gospels explicitly separates the condemned and sacrificed victim from the
resurrected and ascendant Saviour, Venantius merges suffering and triumph,
victim and king:
regnatnt a ligno deus
("The universal Lord is he,
Who reigns and triumphs from the tree').
'Pange, lingua' begins by even more explicitly figuring the redemption as a
successful war of conquest:
Pange, lingua, gloriosi protlium certaminis,
Et super ctucis twpaeo die triumphum nobilem
('Sing, my tongue, the glonous battle,
Sing the ending of the fray,
O'er the Cross, the victor's trophy,
Sound the loud triumphant lay ...')
But the martial rhetoric culminates in a paradox that calls into question the
moral basis of the heroic ethic; for this warrior triumphs, not by conquest,
but by subjugating himself to victimisation:
Qualiter Redemptor orbis immolatus incerit
('Tell how Chnst, the world's Redeemer,
As a victim won the day')
In Venantius's hymns, then, Christian values are certainly in part subordinated
to a heroic code. But equally Christianity, in substituting for the classical
warrior the crucified Hero-Victim, is assimilating the heroic tradition in the
form of a theological symbology. The battles in which the Cross serves as a
figurehead and standard are as likely to be theological conflicts, doctrinal
controversies or moral strugglesChrist against Satan; the church against
paganism; the Christian soul against the world, the flesh and the devilas
military engagements. Thus as early as the sixth century, and in poems likely
to have been known to the Dream-poet(s), new Christian and old pagan
heroic values are polarised rather than merged, collocated but not reconciled,
co-existent as 'collision' rather than as 'fusion'.
VI
The collocation, in a single complex poetic language, of diverse cultural
traditions, clearly facilitates a varying emphasis on divergent aspects of
Christian theology. Insofar as Christ can be seen not as nailed in subjection,
but as voluntarily assuming the Cross, a ready-made symbol of authority and
power, then He can be immediately made to declare, from that position,
both theological godhead and secular mastery: 'regnavit a ligno deus.' This
perception, which is one of the effects of the poem's heroic language, tends
to eliminate physical suffering and to elide the corporeality of the incarnate
Chnst. J. C. Pope speaks of' the heroic aspect of the action, an aspect which
the poet is all along at pains to emphasise as proper to Christ in His divine
nature'.
25
Yet that heroic language also derived from a world-view that was, despite
its apparent religious dimensions, far more secular and materialistic, far less
spiritual and other-wordly, than Christianity. It is that essentially worldly
cultural perspective that aligns Chnst with the noble warrior whose being
would naturally inhabit a social world of communal pleasures, 'hall-joys',
ceremonies of ring- and gold-giving, child-like enjoyment of bright metals
and precious stonesthe world so vividly represented, often in terms of its
loss, in Anglo-Saxon heroic and elegiac poetry. That attachment to the body,
and to the material objects by means of which the body was situated in the
symbolic order, was clearly not dislodged by Christianity from the Anglo-
Saxon imagination. We only have to cite the perpetuation of grave-goods in
Christian bunals such as that of St. Cuthbert,
26
to exemplify the co-existence
of a pagan conception of the body as surviving in some form (and therefore
having need of material objects), and the conception of a body parted from
its spirit at death (and therefore having no use for them). Certainly in due
course grave-goods disappeared: but during the time of their persistence, it
is impossible to define a point at which such objects were used for their
symbolic value rather than their practical utility. The body in the Germanic
tradition, as represented in the poems, is a real body that enjoys pleasure,
suffers pain and is subject to death. Insofar as the Christ of the Dream is
represented within that tradition, the poem is stressing the human and
incarnational torment, rather than the abstract theological triumph, of the
Crucifixion.
The Cross in the poem certainly suffers, and suffers with a graphic and
vivid particularity:
Black nails
Battered through me, opening wide
The wounds of wickedness. When they scoffed
At the Saviour, their spit spattered
Me. In His blood when it sprang
From His side, was my splintered surface
Soaked. (11.6470)
Critics have argued, on the one hand, that the Cross shares the pain of the
Crucifixion
... the tree is so closely identified with Chnst that its trembling suggests his
agony in Gethsemane . . .
2?
The attribution of personality, and therefore volition, allows a moral as well as
physical parallel to be established between Chnst and the cross. Thus it is that
the words of the Cross can bnng us dramatically close to the events of the
Crucifixion, enabling the reader to share in a unique imaginative reconstruction
of Christ's suffering .
M
and on t he ot her (in a curious theological displacement) that it bears t he
pain on Christ' s behalf, thus prot ect i ng his divinity from t he i mput at i on of
mere corporeality:
... He [Chnst] is greviously stretched out . . . all the other sufferings are associated
with the tree.
29
With the agony transferred to the cross, Chnst can sensibly be seen to rule from
the gallows.
30
Bot h these critics ultimately discern in the poem a careful and j udi ci ous
balancing of those divergent interpretations of t he Crucifixion that formed,
wi t hi n t he Christian church, t he key theological controversies of t he day.
How did t he divine and human natures of Chri st actually i nt er-act t hr ough
the Passion, and particularly at t he poi nt of death?
One theological school insisted that Christ had only one nat ure, combi ni ng
the human and divine (hence ' monophysi ci sm' ). The logical ext reme of this
vi ew was that held in t he fifth century by Eut yches, who stated that i n t he
one nature t he divine predomi nat ed t o a degree that precl uded physical
corrupt i on or even agony. The ot her pol e of t he controversy, formulated
chiefly by Severus of Anaoch, proposed a divine nature utterly permeat ed
by humani t y. Clearly either position, devel oped t o an ext reme conclusion,
woul d represent a heretical subversion of t he fundamental Christian doctrines
of t he Incarnation and Redempt i on: one produces a manlike God who was
never really man at all; t he ot her a godlike man whose credentials as a deity
woul d inevitably at some poi nt come under suspicion. Recogni si ng these
dangerous shifts towards positions that woul d much later become Dei sm and
Humani sm, t he Chur ch authorities at t empt ed t o hol d a mi ddl e course,
acknowl edgi ng t he t wo natures i n an undivided person. In t he seventh
century a ' monot heht e' revision was offered by Heraclius, who averred that
the t wo natures of Christ, al t hough distinct, wer e subject t o one will ('thelos').
At t he Lateran Counci l of 694 western chur chmen affirmed their disagreement
by positing t wo wills t o mat ch t he t wo natures, each mysteriously separate
t hough integrated, and wi t h t he human will always naturally conformabl e t o
the divine. This position was firmly established by the English church at the
Council of Hatfield in 679.
31
By anthropomorphising the Cross, the Dream could be argued as reflecting
that controversy, since it dramatises a Crucifixion in which there is both
suffering (though of a strangely sensate inanimate object), and triumph (of a
divine being who has always already departed from the scene of the Passion
'he haefde hisgast onsended
1
,1.49). The controversy obviously tended to separate,
in imaginative and pictorial terms, Christ from the cross: Swanson cites
examples from early Christian iconographic sources of crosses without Christ,
and of Christ without a cross.
32
The Godhead assumes a crucified position,
but without physical entrapment; the cross stands alone as an abstract symbol
of the Christian way. Both Swanton and Bennett suggest, following earlier
scholars, that the poem displays a clear awareness of these debates, and effects
an adroit reconciliation of the theological difficulties, with a diplomatic
avoidance of docrinal controversy:
That the cross itself thus suffers, allows the agony of the Saviour to be succinctly
and dramatically reperesented without putting unwarranted words into the
mouth of Christ himself The device thus allows the poet to maintain a fine
balance between Eutychan and Severan points of view, offending neither those
who maintained that the incarnate Logos could expenence no suffering nor
those who insisted upon its real human frailty.
33
... the English alliterative lines ... epitomize the perfect balance between 'dolour-
ism' and 'triumphalism' that characterizes the whole poem.
34
VII
Hraew colode:
faegere feorgbold (II.72-3)
In The Dream of the Rood, the Cross's narrative leaves Christ at this point, a
point which in human terms can only be conceived of and named as death.
The beautiful body ('faegere/hraew') that proves to have been merely a dwell-
ing-place for the spirit (feorgbold') lies empty and abandoned, chilling in
ordinary mortal corruption ('colode'). The poem contains no empty tomb, no
reassuring angelic visitors, no risen Lord. Christ is certainly imagined, at the
end of the poem, returning in full divine glory to harrow Hell. But that
reference is a 'flashback' within the closing narrative of the dreamer, separated
in time and space from the death on Cross, a past example informing his
own sure and certain hope for the future. In the central narrative of the
Cross, which pursues the established story of the gospels, we are left with
nothing more encouraging than a dead body.
3< 5o THE SIGN OF THE CROSS
The poem's apparent truncation at this point of the essential Christian
story can indeed be defended, either on narrative or liturgical grounds: but
the available defences remain finally unconvincing. The account of the
Crucifixion is presented from the Cross's 'point-of-view': hence only those
events immediately within its field of vision and range of experience are
included. Thus there is no journey from the Praetorium to Golgotha, and
no representation of the gospels' closing and crucial events. But this is a
technical point, an effect of the narrative technique, not an explanation of
the narrative's foreclosing on the crucial revebtion of the essential Christian
mystery.
Perhaps more convincing would be an argument that located the poem
within the church liturgies of Passiontide, and especially Good Friday. In the
virtual reality of the Christian calendar, something approximating to a death,
and a consequent period of mourning for bereavement, intercabtes between
the death on the Cross and the Resurrection on Easter Sunday. In the ritual
'Stations of the Cross', the fourteenth and last object of meditation is the
pbcmg of Jesus's body in the tomb. The poem could be seen as enacting
exactly such a process, delineating a dead zone of time in which the world
can feel the temporary absence of its Saviour, and know the emptiness of life
without God.
There is however, within the poem, a resurrection: it simply is not that
of the risen Christ:
For a second tone
They savagely felled me, npped up my roots,
Cruelly cast me in a deep pit.
Earth closed coldly over my eyes, eyes
That had seen God's dying. Days,
Years passed: and I perceived only
Comfortless clay, and the darkness of death
Then the earth parted, and in pain I was pulled
From the world's womb, bom again to the brightness
Of light. God's disciples dug me up,
Heaved me heavenwards, raised me and dressed me
In raiment of silver, garments of gold. (11.103-14)
It is the Cross, not the Christ, that experiences deposition, burial, exhumation,
resurrection, and even ascension into divine glory.
The poem certainly therefore divides Christ from His Cross, and represents
them as separable entities. But it seems to me difficult to interpret that
abandonment of God in the depiction of mere physical death, and the
corresponding isolation of the Cross as a living embodiment and a speaking
sign of the Christian mystery, as a delicate balancing of antithetical
Christological philosophies into a 'perfect balance'
35
of harmoniously resolved
theological disputation.
The bemg of Christ in the Dream is represented, in my view, as the body
of Germanic tradition: a strong and beautiful body, which fights bravely and
conquers its enemies, but dies m the struggle, and is depicted finally as a dead
hero, lying on the deserted battle-field, keenly cherished and bitterly mourned
by those who owed its occupant their love and loyalty. The Resurrection of
the poem is not of that body, but of the Cross, a sign ('baecett') of the Passion
and Redemption. As such it can be possessed as a material object, and revered
for its organic symbolising of the mystery in which it participated. It can be
decorated with the gold, silver and precious gems that were so beloved of
Anglo-Saxon culture, and which so richly decorate the poetry as well as the
artistry of the period. But above all it can function, in the form either of
material object of veneration, or of abstract sign, as a ritual profession of
faith, a liturgical focus of devotion, or a potent accessory to prayer.
I am, of course, positioning the poem in some perilous theological territory,
among speculations that would certainly in the seventh century have been
identified as contrary to Christian doctrine. But it seems to me, unless we
wish to complete the poem's theological scheme by supplying additional
references that it in fact leaves out, an inescapable conclusion. And although
the doctrinal perils of such a cultural eclecticism are self-evident, they are
also likely to be of interest to modern theological concerns. My interpretation
would suggest that the poem admits to a radical uncertainty about the
Resurrection itself, finding it literally unimaginable (or at least shirking the
challenge of imagining it). The veneration of the Cross as an independent
image solves the problem the poem sets itself, by abstracting from the
Christian narrative a concrete symbol of its central truths, an object that
remains with us after the divinity it shared has returned to its proper home.
The sign of the Cross can be considered, in other words, as more real
than what it signifies; or in semiotic parlance, the signified is circumscribed
by the signifier. Far from reconciling the theological antinomies of the day,
the poet has superseded them by boldly denying the historical veracity of the
Resurrection, and erecting in its place an image, the Sign of the Cross. The
possibility, or even local prevalence of such idolatry is illustrated by Claudius
of Turin, who in 820 'published a fierce attack on the adoration of crosses,
ordering their removal from all churches in his diocese'.
36
VIII
While openly confronting the intractable difficulties encountered here in
teasing out from a devotional poem the essence of its imaginative theology,
we should not underestimate the complexity and sophistication of its proffered
solution. I am proposing that the Dream gathers its Christian and Germanic
inheritances into a medium of violent paradox, constructing an imaginative
fullness that includes acute intellectual tension. Scholars have demonstrated
how underlying the poem can be found the rhetorical device of 'communicatio
idiomatum', a figure developed within contemporary theological controversies
to reconcile the human and divine natures of Christ into a single paradoxical
affirmatione.g. 'genamon hie thaer aelmightigne God" (1.6o) ('then they seized
Almighty God'). But such paradoxes, like metaphors, inevitably highlight
discrepancy as well as parallelism, the incongruity as well as the reconciliation
of differences. If, as T.S. Eliot affirms, 'the impossible uni on/ Of spheres of
existence is actual',
37
the actuality still remains impossible. The Dream can in
this way be seen to speak directly to those modern Christians for whom faith
entails the acceptance of impossibility, an intellectual humility prepared at
certain points to renounce knowledge in favour of mystery, the mystery of
that 'Iesus Chnst: Whom hauing not seene, yee loue, in whom diough now
ye see him not, yet beleeuing, ye reioyce with ioy vnspeakable' (1 Peter,
I.7-8).
At die same time, the poem doesn't simply substitute a symbolic Cross for
a literal resurrection, exchange a lifted sign for a risen Chnst. The Cross of
the poem is represented not as an abstract symbol, but as a living bemg
within whose nature both the agony and the mystery of the Passion are
internalised. The sharing of Christ's agony by the anthropomorphised Cross
is emphasised not in order that it might carry a burden of theological anxiety,
but so as to render the agony of the Crucifixion present to the imagination,
realised in sensory terms, and on a partially human scale. In his Vision of the
Cross, the Dreamer sees not a fixed and abstract symbol, but a 'lively' and
iterable sign, capable of signifying simultaneously agony and tnumph:
Still through the gold my eyes descried
An ancient injury, the world's first wound,
Purple on gold, the passion and the glory,
As blood broke forth from the rood's right side.
Pierced with pity, and filled with fear
I was, as I saw that shifting sign
Alter its appearance, its colour change:
Now it was wet with the sweat of agony,
Now with brilliance of treasure bedecked. (11.22-30)
What the Dreamer is looking at here is Chnst Himself, incarnated in the
pain and majesty of the Cross: always mortally wounded, always ascending
into glory. The Cross has acquired those qualities by its sympathy in suffering,
its proximity to the Passion: physically soaked in tangible sweat and blood,
literally damaged by the violence of victimisation. Hence the poem's imagin-
ing of the Cross as a variable and living sign is informed, via the legend of
the True Cross and its discovery, by that vivid sensuous apprehension of its
original ordeal.
By virtue of that participation in the Passion, the Cross acquires a potent
capability not only of expressing its mystery, but of facilitating the ritual
memorialisation, and more importantly the imaginative re-enactment, of the
Crucifixion itself. The kind of contemplation represented in the poem's
Dream-Vision is essentially a form of 'spiritual exercise' in the method later
formulated by St. Ignatius:
39
an imaginative reconstruction, in the space
between the meditating mind and the object of contemplation, of a revealed
theological truth.
It is at this point that the poem transcends its naturalistic and pagan
inheritance. For here material thingsgold, silver, gems, even the body
itselfbecome implements of devotional exercise and spiritual concentration,
rather than objects of value in themselves. The gold and jewels formerly
distributed by the generous Anglo-Saxon lord have attained a new signifying
potentiality as elements of a devotional icon. In that poignant description of
the dead hero, the poem bids a sad but resigned farewell to its pagan ancestry.
Ultimately the poem is a meditation on, and an example of, the spiritual
value of devotional art. A Cross that speaks can exist only m the poetry that
speaks it. The Cross that exhorts the Dreamer to put its self-revelation into
words, does so in the words of the poem that have already made such an
exhortation possible. And while the Dream internalises this spiritual aesthetic
into a highly sophisticated literary form, it is the Ruthwell Crossa 'preach-
ing Cross', bearing its evangelical speech inscribed upon itself-that exempli-
fies m its totality the multi-cultural (and 'multi-media') character of this
sacred art. In such great stone memorials (as many as 1500 of which still
survive) Anglo-Saxon Christians could directly apprehend, in word and
image, the mystery of the Passion, and imaginatively recreate in their own
lives the suffering and triumph of their Saviour. The capacity of such images
to internalise m concrete form a precis of the whole Christian gospel can be
witnessed in the complaints of Boniface, who in 744 complained 'that worship
at such crosses was detracting from attendance at regular churches'.
40
And
much later when the Covenanters, implementing the Church of Scotland's
1604 Act of Assembly against 'idolatrous monuments', devastated the
Ruthwell Cross,'
41
they were testifying to its anaent catholic power, as well
as bearing witness to their own Pauline insistence on the purer, immaterial
spirituality of the risen Christ.
Faculty of Humanities, Languages and Education, University of Hertfordshire, Wall
Hall, Aldenham, Watford WD2 8AT, UK
3
6
REFERENCES
1
The basic text of The Dream of the Rood
addressed and employed in this essay is that
of Bruce Dickins and Alan Ross (London-
Methuen, 1934, 4th edn 1954, revised
i960). I have also made much use of the
scholarly and critical apparatus supplied by
Michael Swanton m his edition of the
poem (Manchester Manchester UP, 1970,
revised edn, Exeter. Exeter UP, 1987) In
die knowledge drat direct access to the
Anglo-Saxon language is an increasingly
restricted privilege, the poem is presented
and cited in the form of my own, to some
degree 'free', verse translation My quota-
tions from the Anglo-Saxon are from
Dickins and Ross, and use their line num-
bering. In-text translations are either literal
and unreferenced, or refer to the line num-
bers in the verse translation (pp. 205). I
have modernised obsolete orthographic
forms such as dipthongs; and rendered the
letters 'thorn' and 'eth' as 'th', although
they possessed phonetically different values
The translation unconditionally accepts die
edited text of Dickins and Ross.
2
Dickins and Ross, pp 1-13, Swanton,
PP 9-38
3
Dickins and Ross, pp 13-16.
A
Aethelstane of Wessex had clear control
of the whole of England and Scodand by
927, and is conventionally regarded as the
first 'King of all England'. See Lloyd
and Jennifer Laing, Anglo-Saxon England
(Roudedge and Kegan Paul, 1979, London.
Granada, 1982), p 180
5
'Obviously incomplete and metrically
imperfect', Swanton, p. 40.
6
Dickins and Ross, p 17. The quotation is
somewhat unfair, they are actually quite
sceptical about such speculations, and tend
towards the hypothesis that the poem of
the Ruthwell Cross was an earlier version
subsequendy developed in a lost expansion,
written in the Anglian dialect, which in
turn provided the source of the Dream.
1
See G Thomas Tanselle, A Rationale of
Textual Criticism (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvia Press, 1989), pp. 14-15.
8
One of the Riddles, die solution to which
is 'beam' (a word that could, and here does,
mean tree, ship, log, cup or cross) conveys
this tactile veneration of the Cross: 'Friends
often pass me from hand to hand/And I
am kissed by ladies and courteous men.'
For a translation see The Battle of Maldon
and Other English Poems, trans. Kevin
Crossley-Holland, ed Bruce Mitchell
(London- Macmillan, 1965), p 62. All three
forms of relationship to the Cross are also
featured in the Dream, where the Cross is
'widely worshipped' (Li 19), worn or traced
as an insignia 'no-one who bears/ Bright
in his breast diis best of all signs' (II.1556),
and formulated in words- 'reveal your
vision to the world in words' (1 134).
' The alien language and poetic forms we
encounter in modern editions of Anglo-
Saxon verse may well seem strange enough
in themselves to the modern reader.
But those modern editions have already
involved considerable processing, stand-
ardisation and editorial mediation from the
original MS texts The familiar pattern of
alliterating half-lines separated by a caesura,
reflected in both the edited texts and some
translations, is a pattern that does not
appears in the MSS There verse is not
lineated or regularly punctuated as verse,
so what we know as the standard pattern is
therefore a modern editorial refinement.
Editorial decisions on lineaaon are made
on the basis of rules abstracted from the
unhneated corpus itself, so are likely to be
at least dtscutable. The modem texts are
always emended, often radically, sometimes
questionably Some modern editions,
denved from the bibliographical policies of
F P Magoun, introduce to the texts a
dialectal standardisation of spelling and
grammar they did not themselves possess,
the principles of such standardisation being
drawn from systematizations of gramma-
tical rules that have in turn been denved
from the wntten literary corpus These
observations are offered in no hostile spint.
I have no pretensions to the Old English
scholarship of diose scholars and editors,
and am merely concerned to distinguish
between The Dream of the Rood in its earliest
histoncal manifestations, and as it appears
in the modem edition The response
afforded to my unwelcome forays of
199296 into Shakespearean bibliography,
focused in the publication of the series
Shakespearean Originals, has cured me of all
interest m scholarly quarrels. I enter the
hall of the Anglo-Saxon scholars in peace,
leaving all polemical weapons in the sword-
rack by the door
10
See Walter Benjamin, 'Theses on the
Philosophy of History', Illuminations, trans.
Harry Zohn (Jonathan Cape, 1970,
London Fontana, 1973), p 258.
11
See Richard Hamer, ed., A Choice of Anglo-
Saxon Vent (London. Faber and Faber,
J
979)- P
l
S9- Earlier editors and critics
thought the poem consisted of two halves,
possibly by different hands, the second half
certainly regarded as poetically inferior (see
Ehckins and Ross, p. 18) But compare
Swanton, who declares the poem 'a coher-
ent and unified whole' (p 76)
12
For the ambivalence oflaene' see Christine
Fell, 'Perceptions of Transience', in the
Cambridge Companion to Old English
Literature, eds Mal col m Godden and
Mi chael Lapidge, p. 174.
13
For translations of these nddl es, helpfully
titled (so you don' t have t o guess t he
solution), as Sword-Rack and Beam, see
Crosslcy-Holland and Mi t chel l , pp. 6 1 - 2 .
14
J C. Pope, Seven Old English Poems (New
York- Bobbs-Mernll, 1981), p. 43.
15
Bede paraphrased, but did not include, the
hymn m his account of Caedmon, Histona
Ecclestastka Gentis Anglorum, Book IV, ch.
24 (trans C Pl ummer , Venerabilis Bedae
Opera Histoncae, Oxford Cl ar endon Press,
1896). It was added marginally t o t he Latin
version by scribes, and i ncl uded in t he Ol d
English version in place of Bede' s
paraphrase
16
See S Allott, Alcuin of York (York, 1974),
pp 1656.
17
Crossley-Holland and Mi t chel l , p 126.
" Barbara C. Ra w, ' Biblical Literature: t he
Ne w Test ament ' , in Godden and Lapi dge,
eds, pp. 238- 9.
19
Pope, p. 44.
20
Raw in Godden and Lapidge, p. 240, J A.
W. Bennet t , Poetry of the Passion (Oxford
Oxford Uni versi t y Press, 1982), p. 23
21
Bennet t , p 8; Swant on, pp. 423.
22
Bennet t , pp 7- 8.
23
Quot at i ons from R K. Gordon' s prose
translation of Elene, Anglo-Saxon Poetry
(London: Dent, 1926, revised 1954),
pp. 211-12.
24
The translations cited are t hose in t he
New English Hymnal (Nor wi ch: Cant er bur y
Press, 1986)- 'Pange, lingua', Hymns 78 and
517, wher e it forms part of t he Good Friday
liturgy for di e Venerat i on of t he Cross;
'Vextlla regis', Hymn 79.
25
Pope, p. 66.
26
See Lloyd and Jenni fer Laing, pp. 1458.
The cont ent s of Cut hber t ' s coffin are
illustrated m The Anglo-Saxons, ed James
Campbel l (London: Phai don, 1982),
pp. 801.
27
Bennet t , p 20.
28
Swant on, p. 68.
29
Bennet t , p. 4.
30
Swant on, p 71
31
See H. R. Pat ch, ' Liturgical influence
in The Dream of the Rood,' PMLA,
xxxiv (1919), 233-57; Rosemary Woolf,
'Doctrinal influences on The Dream of
the Rood
1
, Medium Aevum, xxvu (1958),
13753; J A Bur r ow, 'An approach t o The
Dream of the Rood', Neophtlologus, xlni
(1959), 123- 33-
32
Swant on, pp 53, 55
33
Swant on, p. 69
34
Bennet t , p. 19
35
Bennet t , p. 19
36
Swant on, p. 55
37
T. S Eliot, "The Dr y Salvages' , Collected
Poems 1909-1962 (London- Faber and Faber,
1963), p. 213.
38
For further reflections on ' faith' in cont r a-
distinction t o ' belief' , see my ' " Kni ght -
enant of fai t h"' . Monsignor Quixote as
"Cat hol i c Fi ct i on' ", Literature and Theology,
7:3 (1993), especially pp 275- 6
39
See Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Personal
Writings, trans. Joseph A. Muni t z and Phi l i p
Endean (Harmondswort h- Pengui n, 1996).
40
Swant on, p. 47
41
Di cki ns and Ross, p. 2.
The Dream of the Rood
For the Church of St Michael and All Angels, Bedford Park
l
The day's deep midnight, once it was,
When all earth's creatures' exhausted eyes
Closed, and sleep their shadows shrouded.
Then night's vast womb a dream delivered:
The fairest of all fantasies.
An astounding structure 5
I seemed to see soar in the sky,
Its beams bathed in the brightest of light.
Gleaming gold enveloped that vision:
A scatter of jewels sparkled on its shaft,
Yet brighter the five stones encrusting its cross-beam. 10
This was no gangster's gallows, no cross for a criminal:
For all Creation's creatures, all sons of soil,
And a heavenly host of all God's angels,
In beauty of paradise perpetually bright
Admired eternally this vision of victory, 15
This cross of conquest, that triumphal tree.
I was smeared with sin, diseased
With gangrene of guilt, foul with my faults;
Yet I saw this wondrous work, gay and glorious
With glimmering gold, joyfully jewelled, 20
Shimmer in splendour: the cross of Christ.
Still through the gold my eyes descried
An ancient injury, die world's first wound,
Purple on gold, the passion and the glory,
As blood broke forth from the rood's right side. 25
Pierced with pity, and filled with fear
I was, as I saw that shifting sign
Alter its appearance, its colour change:
Now it was wet with the sweat of agony,
Now with brilliance of treasure bedecked. 30
A long while I lay, struck to my soul,
Saddened at the sight of the Saviour's tree;
But imagine die wonder, when diis wood
Words uttered, silence broke, spoke
To me!
2
From time's dark backward 35
And abyss, I imagine the hour of my hewing,
When from the wood's end my trunk was toppled,
Wrenched from its roots by the fiercest of foes.
With power they impounded, and made me a spectacle,
A picture of punishment, to rack and to crack 40
The ribs of their criminals. On their shoulders they hefted me,
And on a hill hoisted.
It was then that I saw a splendid Saviour
Approach with alacrity and courage to climb.
Hastily, the young hero stripped Him 45
For action, girded like a gladiator
Ready for the ring. In the sight of spectators,
Fearless and firm, keen for the combat,
He clambered on the cross. He sought no insignia
Of cruel conquest, no brows bound 50
With victorious wreaths: His reward
Was mankind's Redemption, salvation of souls
His only prize.
Though all earth faltered
And flinched with fear, I didn't dare
To bend or to break. I'd have fallen full-length, 55
Flat to the earth, but was forced to stand firm.
I could have crushed each of those enemies,
But by Christ's command I had to standfast.
With shocks I shuddered, when the warrior wound
His strong arms about me: but I daren't stir. 60
More forbidding than fear was the Lord's Word.
Crude and rough-hewn, a cross of wood I was:
Yet I lifted on high the Lord of Hosts;
I held aloft the might of majesty.
3
Black nails
Battered through me, opening wide 65
The wounds of wickedness. When they scoffed
At the Saviour, their spit spattered
Me. In His blood when it sprang
From His side, was my splintered surface
Soaked. In the thrust of a spear 70
Was His spirit's expense,
When all was accomplished,
When life he relinquished,
And gave up the Ghost.
A fearful fate
I endured on that high hill, 75
A dreadful destiny. I saw the Almighty
In agony racked, the corpse of the Ruler
Concealed in clouds. Darkness eclipsed
The original brightness, shadows buried
The Light of the World. All Creation wept 80
At a King's killing; all creatures cried
For Christ on the cross.
A rich man, a follower, arrived from afar,
And begged God's body. Uncertain, anguished,
Humbled with hurt, I surrendered the Saviour 85
To his outstretched arms. They took Him up
Tenderly, torn from His torture,
Left me blood-boltered, impaled by the points
Of annihilating nails. They stretched out His limbs,
Wounded, war-weary; stood at His head 90
To say their good-byes; grieved at his going,
They laid the exhausted hero to rest.
Full in the sight of me, His murderer,
A tomb they constructed, hewn from bright rock,
Sculpted in stone; and there they interred 95
The God of glory. A mournful hymn
They voiced at evensong; and as darkness deepened
Reluctantly departed.
They left Him
Alone there: He needed no companions.
We too were left, three crosses stark 100
Against an anguished sky: three gaunt gallows
On a hill of skulls. The long day waned:
Shadows chilled. In the cool of the evening
The Saviour stiffened.
4
For a second time
They savagely felled me, ripped up my roots, 105
Cruelly, cast me in a deep pit.
Earth closed coldly over my eyes, eyes
That had seen God's dying. Days,
Years passed: and I perceived only
Comfortless clay, and the darkness of death. n o
Then the earth parted, and in pain I was pulled
From the world's womb, bom again to the brightness
Of light. God's disciples dug me up,
Heaved me heavenwards, raised me and dressed me
In raiment of silver, garments of gold. 115
5
So now you know, my friend in faith,
That though bitterly abandoned I was to sharp
Sorrow, now by all Creation's wondering
Creatures I'm widely worshipped:
Men in multitudes pray to my power, 120
Beseech this sign. On me God's baim
In the pride of His Passion, knew on the cross
Punishment's pain: hence I'm now raised in glory
High under heaven, and him can I heal
Who my force fears.
Once I was known 125
As the tree of torture, a sign of injustice;
Till I set all men on the road to righteousness.
See how through suffering I became highly favoured
By the world's Ruler, above all the wood's trees;
Just as Mary, God's mother, 130
Found grace and great favour
In the worid, among women.
6
Now in love I invite you your dream to disclose,
Reveal your vision to the world in words.
Show all creatures the cross on which Christ redeemed 135
Mankind's many sins, and forgave Adam's fault.
ft was he, our grand parent, who first death tasted;
But the Almighty ascended, the Redeemer arose
To heal that hurt.
He died; He is risen;
And He will return, at the day of doom, 140
The Almighty Lord, with all his angels,
To seek out mankind on this middle-earth
And deliver His judgement. With the power
Of justice to all people He'll deal
Their just deserts, as each has deserved 145
In this little life. There's no-one so foolish
As to feel no fear when the Lord
Speaks His sentence. From that great crowd
Of the quick and the dead, He'll single out each,
And ask him to say, in God's honest truth, 150
If it's death he desires, the pangs of perishing,
Punishment's pain, as he Himselffelt it
When fastened to the cross. Then they'll be
Tongue-tied, not know what to say
To the crucified Christ. 155
But no-one who bears,
Bright in his breast this best of all signs
Need feel any fear. Far from earth's confines,
Through the might of the cross, that man will find heaven,
And live with the Lord.
7
And so it befell
That alone, unbefriended, yet happy in heart 160
I acknowledged the cross. My spirit was stirred
To adventure a voyage, to fearlessly seek out
What fate holds in store. The height of my happiness
Is that this cross, before all appeals,
Accepts my prayers; so my hope of protection 165
Rests in that rood. I've no powerful companions
Alive on this earth to shield me from harm;
Hence they've departed to seek out the King,
To sojourn in glory with God Almighty
High in the heavens.
Daily I long 170
For the day when that cross, clearly revealed
To me in a dream, will fetch me forth
From this empty existence, and in paradise place me
With the people of God in perpetual bliss,
Where I will find entire fulfilment 175
And endless joy. He who here among men
Suffered for our faults, gave Himself on the gallows
For our souls' sake, I know as my friend.
Such hope was restored
Of blessing and bliss, and many a poor soul 180
From death delivered, spared
From the pains of Hell's punishment,
When the Son in splendour, peerless in power,
Harrowed all Hell, and from darkness to light
Released innocent souls joyfully to join 185
The angelic host. Then that choice company,
Partners in praise, all raised one voice:
Sang Holy! and Holy! as the Highest came.
Absorbed in adoration, all angels rejoice
At the Hero's return to His heavenly home. 190
trans. Graham Holdemess
The Seafarer
The Seafarer, like its companion-piece The Wanderer, also synthesises
Christian theology with pagan Germanic perceptions and emotions. The
social life of the comitatus, with its close physical relationships and vividly-
realised pleasures, is strongly featured, but again as loss. Secular joys lie in
the past, or visit the imagination as deluding dreams. In The Wanderer that
inconsolable sense of loss and of the harshness of an inhospitable world
virtually forces the exile to turn to Christ. But The Seafarer aligns elegaic
lament with religious renunciation. The pagan world of 'hall-joys' is not
mislaid but superseded; and the embarcation that represents a farewell to
earthly pleasures is also a peregrination towards the new life of faith and
hope in the eternal.
1
My self's own story I truthfully tell,
My traveller's tale, how day after day
To me in a dream, will fetch me forth
From this empty existence, and in paradise place me
With the people of God in perpetual bliss,
Where I will find entire fulfilment 175
And endless joy. He who here among men
Suffered for our faults, gave Himself on the gallows
For our souls' sake, I know as my friend.
Such hope was restored
Of blessing and bliss, and many a poor soul 180
From death delivered, spared
From the pains of Hell's punishment,
When the Son in splendour, peerless in power,
Harrowed all Hell, and from darkness to light
Released innocent souls joyfully to join 185
The angelic host. Then that choice company,
Partners in praise, all raised one voice:
Sang Holy! and Holy! as the Highest came.
Absorbed in adoration, all angels rejoice
At the Hero's return to His heavenly home. 190
trans. Graham Holdemess
The Seafarer
The Seafarer, like its companion-piece The Wanderer, also synthesises
Christian theology with pagan Germanic perceptions and emotions. The
social life of the comitatus, with its close physical relationships and vividly-
realised pleasures, is strongly featured, but again as loss. Secular joys lie in
the past, or visit the imagination as deluding dreams. In The Wanderer that
inconsolable sense of loss and of the harshness of an inhospitable world
virtually forces the exile to turn to Christ. But The Seafarer aligns elegaic
lament with religious renunciation. The pagan world of 'hall-joys' is not
mislaid but superseded; and the embarcation that represents a farewell to
earthly pleasures is also a peregrination towards the new life of faith and
hope in the eternal.
1
My self's own story I truthfully tell,
My traveller's tale, how day after day
In dark of despair I endlessly endured
Heartache's hurt on the water's waste,
Surges of sadness on weltering waves.
Void were my vigils at the mast's foot,
Waste the night-watches, when my boat was battered
And tossed against cliffs. My feet were frozen,
Fettered with frost, cramped with cold;
In the ache of anguish, hot was my heart.
Keen as a knife, desire drew inwards
To stab at my soul.
Those living on land
Who prosper in plenty amongst fair fields,
Can't possibly know of the poor man's pain,
Who, woeful as winterforlorn of his fatherland,
Kept from his kinweathers the waves
Of the ice-cold sea. Hammered by hail,
Savaged by snow, my ears heard only
The sound of the sea, splash of the surge
And the swan's song. The clamour of gulls
My only glee; the call of the curlew,
No man's mirth; the mew's plaint
In place of mead. Where storms beat on stone-cliffs
The icy-winged eagle and frost-feathered tern
Compete m their clamour.
There's no loving lord
To embrace the exile, or fondly befriend,
With outstretched arms, the friendless man.
A life of luxury's made for that man
Who sojourns in cities, caressed with comforts
And warmed with wine. He feels not a fraction
Of the seafarer's sorrow, the hateful hardships
An exile endures. He'll never know,
This creature of comfort, how some of us suffer
On diat vast voyage.
Darkness deepens
With drifts of snow, shadows of night
Bring sleet from the north. Hail falls hard.
Frost grips the ground.
2
And so my heart heaves to wander the waves,
The unplumbed oceans, and taste of the tang
Of the salt-sea's spray; to seek the deep streams
And their restless rolling. There I might seek
Friendship in foreign lands, there I might find
Homeless, a home on an alien shore.
Again and again an impulse invites me,
A peregrine urge to fare far forth;
A mood of migration irks me to travel
The pilgrim's passage, the wanderer's way.
No-one in this world is so haughty in heart,
So generously gifted, nor so peerless in pride,
So daring in deeds, nor so loved of his lord
That he feels no fear before he embarks,
Of what will befall him on the far seas:
What seafarer's lot the Lord holds in store.
He hears no harping, sees no bright hall,
No place of pleasure. Hollow his heart,
And drained of desire; vacant and void
Is the spirit that's set on the traveller's trail,
The mind that's fixed on the whelming waves.
Blossoms burst, fields grow fair,
Forests flourish, the country quickens.
All motions move the stirnng spirit
To prepare for departure, and fathom the flood.
The cry of the cuckoo, singer of spring,
Brings sharp sorrow to the sailor's breast.
Only the longing of seafaring lasts:
The hunger of a heart that desires the deep.
3
So, stirring, my spirit raps at my ribs,
Flutters her feathers, then quits her cage
To soar on the wing, to fathom the flood-ways,
The earth's expanses, the haunts of the whale.
Wheeling and hovering, my heart's hawk yells,
Eagerly inciting the unappeased spirit
To seek the sea's stretches, where the dead lie deep.
Then circling, homing, my falcon stoops,
Repossesses her perch, full of fierce feelings
Of desperate desire: longing for Love she is,
Greedy for Grace.
See, then, why God's gifts
Mean more to me than the petty pleasures
Of this little life! I can see clearly
That no human happiness endures for ever.
There are three deaths, that tall destiny's day
Stand still in doubt: illness, old age,
The sword's sharp edge. Each of these snatches at
Life unsuspecting, dreaming of new dawns,
Doomed to depart. What's said after
By still-speaking tongues is a man's memorial:
It's memory that matters. So strive to accomplish
Actions of worth, do down the devil
And confound your foes, that your meed may be sung
By the sons of men, and echoed by angels
As high as the heavens. For ever and ever,
As life eternal, your fame will be found
In the heavenly host.
4
Dead are the days
Of ancient magnificence, the glories are gone
That once were on earth. No more do we see
Caesars and kings, those givers of gold
Who were hailed as heroes, and loved as lords.
They depart into darkness, earth knows them no more.
The great men have gone, their empire on earth
The meek have inherited: men insignificant
Cling in their weakness to the world's wealth.
Gone is all glory, all splendour spent,
All empire interred. Antique nobility
Droops and decays. Time's always m motion
On this middle-earth. A man ages:
Gaunt and grey-haired, he dreams of departed
Days when his loved lord graced him with gifts;
He remembers the royalty of that peerless patron,
Given to ground now, enveloped in earth.
The spirit's sanctuary is fragile flesh
That melts in mortality, crumbles to clay.
When Ufe leaves that flesh-house, all bodily being
Pleasure's sweet taste, the torment of pain,
The touch of a hand, the hastening of thought
Snuffs out like a flame. A man may hoard
In hidden heaps, a trove of treasure
To safeguard his soul; bereaved, a brother,
Broken with grief, will bury bright gold
In his brother's grave, hoping to light him
On his shadowy way. But what good's gold
To the sinful soul, when empty-handed
It goes before God? The wealth of the world's
Too poor a price, to placate and pacify
That awful power.
5
Great is the glory,
The grandeur of God. Though He fixed the foundations,
Established the earth, the seas and the sky,
Yet will the world fall down before Him
In fear of His wrath. If a man doesn't know
When his death will arrive, unannounced, unexpected,
Like a thief in the night, he's a fool not to feel
A dread of the Lord. Blessed the man
Who's humble in heart, for the Lord's mild mercy
Will melt in his soul. Blessed the man
Who holds his faith firm: his fate is forgiveness,
And his gift will be Grace.
trans. Graham Holderness
December 1996

Sign Cross Dream Rood

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Literatim & Theoiogy, Vd 11 No 4, Datmber 1997

THE SIGN OF THE CROSS:

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