Then the Lord of mankind, the everlasting Shepherd,
Ordained in the midst as a dwelling place- The almighty Lord – the earth for men.
English is a stressed language, and the Old English verse line is a balance of two-
stress phrases linked by alliteration: the first or second stress, or both, must alliter-
ate with the third; the fourth must not. Old English verse is often printed with a
mid-line space to point the metre. Free oral improvisation in a set form requires a
repertory of formulaic units. The style is rich in formulas, often noun-phrases. Thus
in the nine lines of his ‘Hymn’ Cædmon has six different formulas for God, a feature
known as variation. The image of heaven as a roof and of the Lord as protector is
characteristically Anglo-Saxon.Northumbria and The Dream of the Rood
Many of the manuscripts which perished in the 1530s in Henry VIII’s destruction of
the monasteries (see Chapter 3) may have been in Old English. About 31,000 lines
of Old English verse survive, in four main poetry manuscripts. These were written
about the year 1000, but contain earlier material. Much is lost, but three identifiable
phases of Old English literature are the Northumbria of the age of Bede (d.735), the
programme of Alfred (d.899), and the Benedictine Revival of the late 10th century.
The artistic wealth of Northumbria is known to us through Bede, but also
through surviving illuminated books such as the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Codex
Amiatinus,and some fine churches, crosses and religious art. The Ruthwell Cross is
from this period: in 1642 this high stone cross near Dumfries, in Scotland, was
smashed as idolatrous by order of the General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland. In
1823,however, the minister reassembled and re-erected it, and it now stands 5.7
metres tall. It was an open-air cross or rood, covered with panels in deep relief show-
ing scenes from the life of Christ, each with an inscription in Latin. On it is also
carve d in runic characters a poem which in a longer MS. version is known as The
Dream of the Rood.This longer text in the Vercelli Book (c.1000) has 156 lines. The
Ruthwell text,which once ran to about 50 lines, is itself a great poem. If carved c.700,
it may be the first substantial English verse to survive.
The Dreamer in the poem sees at midnight a glorious cross rise to fill the sky,
worshipped by all of creation. It is covered with gold and jewels, but at other times
co vered with blood. The Dreamer continues:Yet lying there a long while
I beheld, sorrowing, the Healer’s Tree
Till it seemed that I heard how it broke silence,
Best of wood, and began to speak:
‘Over that long remove my mind ranges
Back to the holt where I was hewn down;
From my own stem I was struck away,
dragged off by strong enemies,Wrought into a roadside scaffold.
They made me a hoist for wrongdoers.
The soldiers on their shoulders bore me
until on a hill-top they set me up;
Many enemies made me fast there.22 1 · OLD ENGLISH LITERATURE: TO 1100
alliteration The linking of
words, or stressed syllables,
by use of the same initial
letter. In Old English verse, all
vowels are deemed to
alliterate.