devotion’, affecting the emotions and moving the audience from confusion towards
faith. It boldly adapts the Gospel accounts to the culture of the audience, employing
the Old English riddle tradition, in which an object is made to speak, and telling the
Crucifixion story from the viewpoint of the humble creature. The poem fills living
cultural forms with a robust theology, redirecting the heroic code of loyalty and
sacrifice from an earthly to a heavenly lord.Heroic poetry
Early literatures commonly look back to a ‘heroic age’: a period in the past when
warriors were more heroic and kings were kings. The Christian heroism ofThe
Dream of the Rood redirected the old pagan heroism which can be seen in fragments
ofGermanic heroic poetry.Waldere, an early poem, features the heroics of Walter’s
defence of a narrow place against his enemies.Finnsburh, another early poem set on
the continent, is a vividly dramatic fragment on a fight also treated in Beowulf.Such
poems recall times before the Angles came to Britain in the 5th century, as do the
minstrel poems Widsith and Deor. Widsith (meaning ‘far-traveller’) is the name of a
scop (poet), who lists the names of continental tribes and their rulers, praising gener-
ous patrons. Deor is a scopwho has lost his position; to console himself, he recalls
famous instances of evil bringing forth good, and after each stanza sings the refrain
Thæs ofereode, thisses swa maeg: ‘That went by; this may too.’Deor is one of only
three stanzaic poems. The first stanza goes:
Wayland knew the wanderer’s fate:
That single-willed earl suffered agonies,
Sorrow and longing the sole companions
Of his ice-cold exile. Anxieties bit
When Nithhad put a knife to his hamstrings,
Laid clever bonds on the better man.
That went by; this may too.
This stor y of the imprisonment of Wayland, the smith of the gods, has the (heathen)
happy ending of successful multiple vengeance. The hamstrung Wayland later
escaped, having killed his captor Nithhad’s two sons and raped his daughter
Beadohild; Beadohild bore the hero Widia, and was later reconciled with Wayland.
A scene from this fierce legend is carved on an 8th-century Northumbrian whale-
bone box known as the Franks Casket: it shows Wayland offering Nithhad a drink
from a bowl he had skilfully fashioned from the skull of one of Nithhad’s sons;
behind Nithhad, a pre gnant Beadohild. Little of the unbaptized matter of Germania
survives in English. The Franks Casket juxtaposes pagan and Christian pregnancies:
the next panel to Wayland, Nithhad and Beadohild shows the Magi, the star, Mary
and her child.
Although English writing came with Christianity, not everything that was written
was wholly Christian. Pope Gregory, according to the story in Bede, saw some fair-
haired boys for sale in the Roman slave market: on hearing that they were Angles and
heathen, he sent Augustine to convert the Angles, to change them so that, in a
famous papal wor dplay, the Angles would become worthy to share the joys of the
angels.Cædmon converted the traditional praise of heroism performed by poets
such as Widsith and Deor to spreading the Gospel. But so strongly heroic was the
poetic repertoire that the Angles at times seem to translate the Gospel back into24 1 · OLD ENGLISH LITERATURE: TO 1100