Dream of the Rood Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Monica Brzezinski

Critical Essay by Monica Brzezinski

SOURCE: "The Harrowing of Hell, the Last Judgment, and The Dream of the Rood," in Neuphilologische Mitteilungen: Bulletin de la Socieété Néophilologique, Vol. LXXXIX, No. 3, 1988, pp. 252-65.

Below, Brzezinski contends that the last few lines of The Dream of the Rood refer to the Last Judgment rather than to the Harrowing of Hell.

The narrative structure of The Dream of the Rood has been described as a Chinese box-like arrangement in which the Dreamer's first-person report of his vision frames the speech of the Rood, which in turn encloses a description of the passion of Christ. This neat equation of the Dream's structure with that of a Russian doll is, however, inadequate, as it neglects the concluding lines of the poem: the nested narratives are followed by a puzzling eight-and-a-half line coda which has been traditionally identified as "a brief and oblique allusion to the Harrowing of Hell."...
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