The Dream of the Rood

Preserved in the tenth-century Vercelli Book, the poem may be as old as the eighth-century Ruthwell Cross, and is considered one of the oldest extant works of Old English literature.

The Vercelli Book, which is dated to the tenth century, includes twenty-three homilies interspersed with six religious poems: The Dream of the Rood, Andreas, The Fates of the Apostles, Soul and Body, Elene and a poetic, homiletic fragment.

There is an excerpt on the cross that was written in runes along with scenes from the Gospels, lives of saints, images of Jesus healing the blind, the Annunciation, and the story of Egypt, as well as Latin antiphons and decorative scroll-work.

Daniel H. Haigh argued that the inscription of the Ruthwell Cross must be fragments of a lost poem by Cædmon, portrayed in Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People as the first Christian English poet,[13] stating "On this monument, erected about A.D. 665, we have fragments of a religious poem of very high character, and that there was but one man living in England at that time worthy to be named as a religious poet, and that was Caedmon".

[17] Two of Cynewulf's signed poems are found in the Vercelli Book, the manuscript that contains The Dream of the Rood, among them Elene, which is about Saint Helena's supposed discovery of the cross on which Jesus was crucified.

In a series of papers, Leonard Neidorf has adduced metrical, lexical, and syntactical evidence in support of a theory of composite authorship for The Dream of the Rood.

[25] The style and form of Old English literary practices can be identified in the poem's use of a complex, echoing structure, allusions, repetition, verbal parallels, ambiguity and wordplay (as in the Riddles), and the language of heroic poetry and elegy.

In Heathen Gods in Old English Literature, Richard North stresses the importance of the sacrifice of the tree in accordance with pagan virtues.

[27] North suggests that the author of The Dream of the Rood "uses the language of this myth of Ingui in order to present the Passion to his newly Christianized countrymen as a story from their native tradition".

Work of the period is notable for its synthetic employment of 'Pagan' and 'Christian' imagery as can be seen on the Franks Casket or the Kirkby Stephen cross shaft which appears to conflate the image of Christ crucified with that of Woden/Odin bound upon the Tree of Life.

Bruce Mitchell notes that The Dream of the Rood is "the central literary document for understanding [the] resolution of competing cultures which was the presiding concern of the Christian Anglo-Saxons".

[24] Within the single culture of the Anglo-Saxons is the conflicting Germanic heroic tradition and the Christian doctrine of forgiveness and self-sacrifice, the influences of which are readily seen in the poetry of the period.

John Canuteson believes that the poem "show[s] Christ's willingness, indeed His eagerness, to embrace His fate, [and] it also reveals the physical details of what happens to a man, rather than a god, on the Cross".

In this way, "the poem resolves not only the pagan-Christian tensions within Anglo-Saxon culture but also current doctrinal discussions concerning the nature of Christ, who was both God and man, both human and divine".

The Cross says, Jesus is depicted as the strong conqueror and is made to appear a "heroic German lord, one who dies to save his troops".

Mary Dockray-Miller argues that the sexual imagery identified by Faith Patten, discussed below, functions to 'feminize' the Cross in order for it to mirror the heightened masculinity of the warrior Christ in the poem.

[32] Rebecca Hinton identifies the resemblance of the poem to early medieval Irish sacramental penance, with the parallels between the concept of sin, the object of confession, and the role of the confessor.

She traces the establishment of the practice of penance in England from Theodore of Tarsus, archbishop of Canterbury from 668 to 690, deriving from the Irish confession philosophy.