Erin Michelle Goeres [email protected]

The Dream of the Rood

Please write an essay of 1700-2200 words answering ONE of the following questions:

1) Write a detailed analysis of The Dream of the Rood , showing how form, style and content work together.

2) ‘In form the poem is a dream vision. […] Stylistically however, it contains elements of the riddle form.’ What light do such generic parallels cast on The Dream of the Rood ?

3) ‘To some extent, every Old English poem makes a leap of imagination into the cultural gap between the past and the present, [...] secular Germanic and Christian Latin values' (ROY M. LIUZZA). Explore these ‘cultural gaps’ in The Dream of the Rood.

Essays are due in my pigeon hole at 9am on Monday, 21 Feb (6th wk).

Primary Sources

The Old English text can be found in Mitchell and Robinson and on the Old English Coursepack on Weblearn. Another excellent edition with detailed textual notes is by Michael Swanton (Exeter, 1996).

There is a translation of the poem in Hamer’s A Choice of Anglo-Saxon Verse .

Secondary Sources

Carragin, amonn. Ritual and the Rood: Liturgical Images and the Old English Poems of the Dream of the Rood Tradition (London, 2005).

Connor, Patrick W. ‘Religious Poetry’ in Pulsiano and Treharne, eds, A Companion to Anglo-Saxon Literature (Oxford, 2001) 251-267.

Dockray-Miller, Mary. ‘The feminized cross of the Dream of the Rood’. Philological Quarterly 76:1 (1997), 1-18.

Donoghue, D., ‘The Miracle’ in Old English Literature: A Short Introduction (Oxford, 2004), 56-79.

Fell, Christine. ‘Runes and riddles in Anglo-Saxon England’ in Hough and Lowe, eds , Lastworda Betst (Donington, 2002) 264-277.

Galloway, Andrew. ‘Dream in The Dream of the Rood and The Wanderer ’ Review of English Studies 45:180 (1994) 475-485.

Erin Michelle Goeres [email protected]

Garde, Judith. Old English Poetry in Medieval Christian Perspective : A Doctrinal Approach (Cambridge, 1991).

Irvine, M., ‘Anglo-Saxon Literary Theory Exemplified: Interpreting the Cross in The Dream of the Rood and Elene ’ in O’Brien O’Keeffe, ed, Old English Shorter Poems: Basic Readings (New York, 1994), 31-63.

Johnson, D.F., ‘Old English religious poetry: Christ and Satan and The Dream of the Rood’ in Aertsen and Bremmer, eds, Companion to Old English Poetry (Amsterdam, 1994), 159-187.

Keefer, Sarah Larratt. ‘Old English Religious Poetry’ in Johnson and Treharne, eds, Readings in Medieval Texts (Oxford, 2005) 15-29.

Kendall, Calvin. ‘From sign to vision: the Ruthwell Cross and The Dream of the Rood’ in Karkov et al, eds, The Place of the Cross in Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge, 2006), 129-157.

Marchand, James W. The Leaps of Christ and The Dream of the Rood in Wright et al, eds, Source of Wisdom (Toronto, 2007), 80-89.

McEntire, S., ‘The devotional context of the cross before AD 1000’ in Liuzza, ed, Old English Literature (New Haven, 2002), 392-403.

Pasternack, C.B., ‘Stylistic disjunctions in the Dream of the Rood ‘ in Liuzza, ed, Old English Literature (New Haven, 2002), 404-424.

Raw, B.C., ‘Biblical Literature: The New Testament’ in Godden, and Lapidge, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature (Cambridge, 1986), 227-242.

---. ‘The Cross in The Dream of the Rood Martyr, Patron and Image of Christ’. Leeds Studies in English 38 (2007), 1-15.

Szarmach, Paul E. ‘The Dream of the Rood as ekphrasis’ in Minnis and Roberts, eds, Text, Image and Interpretation (Turnhout, 2007), 267-288.

See also http://www.english.ox.ac.uk/oecoursepack/rood/reading.html for more material.