The Dream of the Rood

The historian in me is getting the better of me again. While looking randomly for something else, I came across this , a poem I had long wanted to read. The poem itself is interesting as one of the earliest examples of written poetry in English (sometimes I wish I could read Old English!) but what I found most interesting was what it revealed of Old English theology.


In the poem itself the cross on which Jesus was crucified is heard to speak to someone (addressed as 'beloved warrior') in a dream, and to inspire him to preach the gospel (itself an Old English word for good news). But what does the poet understand by the gospel?

Well, it seems quite familiar really. He talks about how on the cross "Almighty God suffered for mankind’s many sins" and that "He tasted death there. However, the Lord arose again." Although the fact that words are being put into the mouth of the cross ('rood' is Old English for 'rod,' ie the cross) suggests that the poet was trying to encourage the veneration of relics, and there are other hints that this is the case, his idea of what was going on at that pivotal moment in history isn't very different to what you might hear preached today.

What I found different from the way that the crucifixion of Jesus is spoken of today was that so much of the language and imagery used to describe Jesus is of a Saxon warrior. Today we are reviled by the idea of God as a fighter in the style of the Anglo-Saxon hero, and prefer to think of Jesus as gentle, pacifist, submitting to the will of the authorities who tried and crucified him. And of course, Jesus was gentle, obedient to his father, and saddened by the pain around him. He rode into Jerusalem on a donkey's colt to avoid people turning him into a military hero. But as C.S. Lewis puts it "He's not a tame lion." Jesus got angry, turning the money-changers out of the temple courts. He was not afraid to confront wrongdoing or to do things which created opposition. Although we may not be comfortable with the idea of Jesus as a warrior, we describe Jesus' death in terms of a battle, as a victory over sin and death, so although describing Jesus as a warrior isn't something we're used to, it makes sense (see Ephesians 6).

This makes me wonder who the narrator is meant to be. Is he a monk, a preacher? The English church sent many evangelists to Germany- is this what he is describing when he talks about his mind being impelled on his way? Are his battles merely spiritual, or is the narrator really a warrior? Was the poem written as part of the church's attempt to get the warrior aristocracy to be more civilised, and to support the church more? I don't know, and we probably never will. But what the poet is doing here is to make the message of God's salvation and the need to go and preach it understandable for the people of his time, by using character types that were already familiar and that his audience could identify with. That's something we should still be doing today.