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Updated: June 4, 2025
The amiable and intelligent Dr Duncan, minister of Ruthwell, who had conferred on society the blessing of savings-banks for the industrious poor, was the first to describe to the world these singular chronicles of ancient life. The subject was afterwards brought forward in a more popular style by Dr Buckland, in his lively book, the Bridgewater Treatise on Geology.
Haigh observed that the design on this side was the same as on the two sides of the Ruthwell Cross.* The north and the south sides are in a state of good preservation, and are covered with a beautiful design in knotwork, and alternate lines of foliage, flowers, and fruit.
Muller, considered that the Ruthwell Cross could not be older than the year 1000, and he arrived at this conclusion by a study of the ornamentation, which he placed as late as the Carlovingian period, the style having been imported from France into England.
The comfort of his life has come to the poet. The greatest of all great things is his. The Rood my trust shall be. I cannot close this chapter without saying something about the great stone rood known as the Ruthwell Cross, because it bears upon it part of this poem engraved in runes. The cross is at Ruthwell, in Dumfriesshire. It is very old, probably dating from the tenth or eleventh century.
Another remarkable cross is that of Ruthwell, now sheltered from wind and weather in the Durham Cathedral Museum. It is very similar to that at Bewcastle, though probably not wrought by the same hands. In the panels are sculptures representing events in the life of our Lord.
Haigh further remarked that the scroll-work on the east side of the Bewcastle monument, and on the two sides of that at Ruthwell was identical in design, and differed very much from that which he found on other Saxon crosses.
The dream of the Holy Rood. The Ruthwell Cross. To each of these men Be hell's door shut, heaven's unclosed, Eternally opened the kingdom of angels, Joy without end, and their portion appointed Along with Mary, who takes into mind The one most dear of festal days Of that rood under heaven.
The side facing westward has suffered most from storm and rain. It bears on its surface two sculptured figures, and the principal runic inscription. The lower figure, that representing our Lord, has been much mutilated by accident or design. He stands as He is seen on the Ruthwell Cross, with His feet on the heads of swine, as trampling down all unclean things.
Cynewulf, being a Northumbrian, presumably wrote in the old Northumbrian language such as is inscribed on the cross, but all his poems as they have come down to us have passed into the West Saxon tongue, and if the fragment on the Ruthwell Cross is, as modern archxologists aver, later than the Dream in the Vercelli Codex it must be a re-translation into the dialect in which it was first written.
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.
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