The Cambridge Old English Reader

Since early in the fourth century, the cult of the cross has provided Christianity with its most powerful image – an enduring reminder of the sacrifice whereby Christ, through his crucifixion, offered redemption to fallen humankind. The Dream of the Rood presents an intense and original treatment of this theme. The full 156-line poem occurs only on fols. 104–6 of the ‘Vercelli Book’, a manuscript written in England in the later tenth century but now in the Biblioteca Capitolare at Vercelli in Italy. There are three other poems and eighteen prose homilies in the volume, which seems to have been compiled as a source of meditative and penitential reading for the faithful.

A variant text of several lines of The Dream of the Rood appears also on a twenty-two-foot high Anglo-Saxon stone cross which was extensively damaged during the Reformation but is now restored and on display at Ruthwell in Dumfriesshire, Scotland. The lines are inscribed in runic characters, which were used regularly by the Anglo-Saxons before they learned the Roman alphabet from Christian monks and thereafter continued in use for decorative purposes. Traditionally, the inscription on the cross, which accompanies carved scenes of biblical and other events, has been dated to the eighth century, though this view has been challenged. In addition, two lines echoing the speech of the cross in the poem are engraved on a small silver reliquary cross, known as the Brussels Cross, dating from the end of the tenth century. These various occurrences are enough to suggest that our poem, in whole or in part, was known widely.

Meticulously structured, the poem is framed by the first-person testimony of the narrator (lines 1–27 and 122–56), to whom the vision of a speaking cross has been granted, apparently in a dream. Within this frame, the long central section is another first-person narrative, that of the cross itself on which Christ was crucified, which tells how, as a tree, it was torn from its roots and, initially against its will, became a participant in the events on Calvary.