The Visionary Cross Project

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Dream of the Rood poem

The Dream of the Rood is the modern title given to an anonymous Old English poem associated with the other objects investigated in this project: the late tenth-century Vercelli Book, eighth-century Ruthwell Cross, and mid-eleventh-century Brussels Reliquary Cross.

One of the most beautiful poems in the Old English corpus, the Dream of the Rood describes a dream-encounter with a shape-shifting image that is at once and alternately a tree, a beacon (a word used to describe the Bewcastle cross), a sign, and a cross sometimes covered with blood, and sometimes covered (like the Brussels cross) with gold and jewels. The poem ends with the Cross instructing the dreamer to tell what he or she has seen and with the dreamer giving an expression of devotion and commemoration that recalls the inscriptions on the Bewcastle and Brussels crosses.

The poem is unusual for several reasons: versions are found in more than one contemporary source two dialects (95% of poetry in the Old English poetic corpus is known from a single source; only three texts are known to survive in different dialects). It describes a dream-vision in which inanimate objects are given human qualities and allowed to speak in the first person. The relationship among the surviving copies is far from clear. The longest text is found in the Vercelli Book, a late tenth-century miscellany of Old English prose and poetic texts concerned with “last things”: death, the day of judgement, and the resurrection of the body.

The Poem and the Ruthwell and Brussels Crosses

The 156 line Vercelli text of the Dream of the Rood shares approximately 19 lines with the the runic inscription on the Ruthwell Cross. The connection between the two is indirect, however: the Ruthwell text is in the Northumbrian dialect (an ancestor of modern Lowlands Scottish English), and the common lines, while clearly related to the Vercelli text, also show significant differences. They are at times quite different metrically, and the Ruthwell Inscription shows evidence to suggest that it was adapted to fit its context on the stone cross.

If the runic carving on Ruthwell is coeval with the rest of the monument, then the poem has a textual history that is longer and more geographically and linguistically diverse than almost any vernacular poem in the period. The existence of a related couplet (possibly a citation) on Brussels, moreover, suggests that it occupied a very significant place in the vernacular literary imagination: the only known example of such possible citation from the period is from the verse translation of the Psalter.