A Summary of the Poem “ The Dream of the Rood”
This article seeks to present the summary of an article titled “The Dream of the Rood”. The Dream of the Rood is an article that is based on old English lyric. It stands out to be the oldest and even the most exquisite poem with a religious base using the English language. The poem has had a significant influence and performance. Due to this reason, many scholars have dedicated most of their study time on this article. Therefore, this article is also oriented on scholarly articles from elites in the field. The poem comprises of 156 lines (Coker, 2019). The narrator or the author of the poem, talk about a beautiful tree referred to as the rood. In other words, the rood is the cross on which Jesus Christ from the christian faith died.
The rood discloses its story of how it was forced to be the instrument or tool used to implicate the death of Jesus Christ (Coker, 2019). According to the Christian faith, Jesus Christ was supposed to be the messiah or the saviour. He was also supposed to die on the rood to saver humanity from its evils and sins. In the poem, the rood is assigned some human characteristics so that it can talk about its experience during the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Due to that ability, the rood talks of how it experienced wounds from the nails used to hold Jesus on it, more injuries also resulted from spear shafts aimed at Jesus, but they made their way past Jesus and implicated wounds of the rood. The rood also talks of how it was humiliated by insults and mockery that was made to Jesus. All this was purposed to facilitate the fulfilment of the will of God so that humankind could be saved.
As early as the 8th century, the poem was recognized in the incomplete form. This was courtesy of runic inscriptions that were legible on the Ruthwell Cross. The Ruthwell Cross is a twenty-two-foot cross made from the Celtic ornate and scientific study reveals that it dates back to the 7th or 8th centuries. Currently, the Ruthwell Cross is a historical monument that is archived in Ruthwell Church in Dumfries District in Scotland. However, during the 10th century, a discovery that presented the complete version of the article or the poem was made. During this century, there was a discovery of a silver reliquary cross ( The Brussels Cross) that had some two inscriptions on it. The inscriptions were similar to what was presented on the Ruthwell Cross.
The facts provided above do not provide knowledge of the exact date, when the poem was written or even the author of the poem. The details of the 8th and 10th century are approximations derived from a linguistic analysis of the poem (Coker, 2019). Its advancements and interpretation of other languages are entirely attributed to its fame and popularity. The entire of the 10th century presented only one manuscript copy poem as it is the Vercelli Book. This book contained three other different poems and 18 sermons. The poem was written using the Late West Saxon English dialect. However, some of the words do survive in modern English. It is a challenge for advanced English speakers because no one can understand ancient English without studying its words and grammar first.
Work Cited
Coker, Matthew D. “The Dream of the Rood and the Function of Hypermetric Lines.” Notes and Queries (2019).