Looking for the Cross

Once in a while something takes me back to a piece of literature I haven’t thought of for ages. Not long ago I read an article about medieval art that referred to the Ruthwell Cross, which is in a church near Dumfries in southern Scotland. There was also mention of an Old English poem, The Dream of the Rood, some verses of which are inscribed on the cross. I hadn’t thought of that poem for ages, probably not since reading it in college, when it was the second item in the first volume of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, a staple of English department syllabi. Except there, at least in my ancient edition, it is in prose. In search of another version, I turned to the internet and found a more appealing poetic rendering (http://faculty.uca.edu/~jona/texts/rood.htm if you’re interested).
Although authorities do not agree, some credit the poem to an Anglo-Saxon poet called Cynewulf about whom little is known. But as the Norton editors point out, the poem “may antedate its manuscript by almost three centuries,” precisely because some passages are carved on the Ruthwell Cross, which is earlier—the manuscript is tenth century. But in one sense none of this scholarly where when and who matters much, nor is it necessary to be a believer to comprehend the beauty of the poem; what counts is the power of the language, and of the dreamer’s vision of the cross on which Christ died. I was struck anew by the immediacy of the imagery, as in, for instance, the following lines: “the young hero stripped himself—he, God Almighty-- / strong and stout-minded. He mounted the high gallows, / bold before many, when he would loose mankind. / I shook when that Man clasped me. I dared, still, not bow to earth, / fall to earth’s fields, but had to stand fast. / Rood I was reared. I lifted a mighty King, / Lord of the heavens, dared not to bend.”
It’s all there, the mix of the concrete and the literal with the visionary that makes the little art we have of so early a time compelling. Curious to know more about the Ruthwell Cross, I followed the original article’s reference to art historian Meyer Schapiro’s essay and found it in Late Antique, Early Christian and Medieval Art . Insightful and thorough as always, he leaves no stone unturned in detailing the religious meaning of the cross, which in turn helps to expand the meaning of the poem—even if the two reflect slightly different periods. My journey from the original article to the poem and then to Schapiro was a reminder of the satisfaction of pursuing some small matter with the help of a few books, the internet, and a library.