SOURCE: "Christ as Poetic Hero," in A Critical History of Old English Literature, New York University Press, 1965, pp. 124-45.

In the following excerpt, Greenfield centers on the prominent role of Christ in The Dream of the Rood, emphasizing "the poem's double stress on the triumphant and suffering Christ. '

[Christ] is, by the nature of His Passion, eminently central to the Dream of the Rood, the finest expression of the Passion in Old English poetry. This 156-line narrative-lyrical adoration of the Cross survives in the Vercelli Book, and part of it appears in Northumbrian runic inscription in the margins of the east and west faces of the eighth-century Ruthwell [rivl] Cross in Dumfriesshire, Scotland. Two lines reminiscent of the poem also appear on the late tenth-century Brussels Cross. The relation between the Ruthwell inscription and the Vercelli text is not clear: is the former a condensation of an...