Dream of the Rood, The

Dream of the Rood, The

      Old English lyric, the earliest dream poem and one of the finest religious poems in the English language, once, but no longer, attributed to Caedmon or Cynewulf. In a dream the unknown poet beholds a beautiful tree—the rood, or cross, on which Christ died. The rood tells him its own story. Forced to be the instrument of the saviour's death, it describes how it suffered the nail wounds, spear shafts, and insults along with Christ to fulfill God's will. Once blood-stained and horrible, it is now the resplendent sign of mankind's redemption. The poem was originally known only in fragmentary form from some 8th-century runic inscriptions on the Ruthwell Cross, now standing in the parish church of Ruthwell, now Dumfries District, Dumfries and Galloway Region, Scot. The complete version became known with the discovery of the 10th-century Vercelli Book in northern Italy in 1822.

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  • Dream of the Rood — The Dream of the Rood is one of the earliest Christian poems in the corpus of Old English literature and an example of the genre of dream poetry. Like most Old English poetry, it is written in alliterative verse. Rood is from the Old English rod… …   Wikipedia

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  • Dream of the Rood, The — (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 …   Encyclopedia of medieval literature

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