SOURCE: Robert C. Rice, "The Penitential Motif in Cynewulf's Fates of the Apostles and in His Epilogues," in Anglo-Saxon England, Cambridge University Press, Vol. 6, 1977, pp. 105-19.

In the following essay, Rice defends the importance of the creative expression in Cynewulf's Fates of the Apostles, particularly in the depiction of spiritual atonement.

In the past few years a real advance has been made in the appreciation of Cynewulf's shortest signed poem, the Fates of the Apostles, extant in the Vercelli Book. For most of the century and more since this poem was first published critical opinion has been almost unanimously unfavourable about its literary merit¹ and until recently scholarly attention has been limited mainly to textual and source investigations. Today, however, illuminating studies, such as those by James L. Boren and Constance B. Hieatt,² have made us aware of the poem's subtleties of image and structure. In particular, now...