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Updated: June 12, 2025
So the great Christian poet, Cynewulf, wrote his name in runes, which is how we know him to be the author of some of the poems we have been considering. There is a small sword in the British Museum with runes on it, which was found in the Thames. In connection with the runes I want to tell you of two old poems, which may be related to each other.
Thus, the form that could most easily be carried in the memory and recited, would naturally be the first to flourish. We have seen something of early English religious poetry in Caedmon's work and that of his followers; and next we shall come back to poetry with Cynewulf, who made great and holy verse.
Of Cynewulf, greatest of the Anglo-Saxon poets, excepting only the unknown author of Beowulf, we know very little. Indeed, it was not till 1840, more than a thousand years after his death, that even his name became known.
You have only to compare Beowulf, the epic the Saxons brought with them from the continent, with the poetry of Caedmon and Cynewulf, or with such poems as The Phoenix, to see how Irishism tinged the minds of these Saxon pupils of Irish teachers with, as Stopford Brooke says, "a certain imaginative passion, a love of natural beauty, and a reckless wildness curiously mingled with an almost scientific devotion to metrical form."
"It must come to that at last, my king," exclaimed Cynewulf, "or Wessex will follow the example of Mercia." "Better lose my crown then and become a subject, with a subject's liberty to love." "A subject could never marry within the prohibited degree," said a grey-headed counsellor. "Concubine!" said Edwy, and his cheek flushed, "she is my wife and your queen."
The learned philologist Grimm again printed the longest of the poems in 1840, but it was Kemble who identified the fourth poem of the series The Dream of the Rood with the runic inscription on the Ruthwell Cross, and it was he who first suggested that all the poems in the Vercelli Codex, consisting of 135 leaves, were by Cynewulf, who like Caedmon was a Northumbrian, and lived in the second half of the eighth century.
From the ideals of these three poems, and from peculiarities of style and meter, it is probable that their author wrote also Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. If so, the unknown author is the one genius of the age whose poetry of itself has power to interest us, and who stands between Cynewulf and Chaucer as a worthy follower of the one and forerunner of the other.
Let us hear something of what our old poet sings concerning this in the poem named after the heroine of the finding, St Helena; the poem known as "Elene." Cynewulf is one of the poets of the Cross. His poetry is literally stamped with the mark of the Holy Rood.
In his very heart Elfric wished that Edwy might never arrive there, yet he knew not what to say. "Well," said the prince, observing his hesitation, "you may go on with Cynewulf and the main body of the army, which will cross the Avon higher up, and I will make excuse that your duties detain you.
In conclusion, we may, for the sake of clearness, recapitulate, first: that although there can no longer be any reasonable doubt that the runes on the Ruthwell obelisk are by the Northumbrian poet, Cynewulf, it has by no means been satisfactorily proved that these runes are of a subsequent date to the West-Saxon version of the poem in the Vercelli Codex, but that probability seems rather to point to an earlier date than the second half of the tenth century; and secondly, that so close a resemblance between the two Crosses does not necessarily imply that they date from absolutely the same period.
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