Meanwhile, in 1822, a German scholar, Dr. Friedrich Blume, had discovered in the cathedral library at Vercelli in the Milanese six Anglo-Saxon poems of the early part of the eleventh century, which discovery aroused great interest both in Germany and in England.  Blume copied the manuscript, and Mr. Benjamin Thorpe printed and published it.  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.  It was Kemble also who first gave The Dream of the Rood a modern English rendering.*

* A translation of the fragment in Old Northumbrian had indeed been attempted at the beginning of the nineteenth century by Mr. Repp and also by a disciple of the great Fin Magnusen, Mr. J. M. M’Caul, but the least said about these versions the better, both being wide of the mark.  Being imperfectly acquainted with Old English they made the most absurd statements regarding the purpose the monument was supposed to have served.

So far steady progress had been made, except one step which is now stated by modern Anglo-Saxon scholars to have been a false one.  Professor Stephens following Haigh thought he could decipher on the top stone of the cross the words Cadmon Mae Fawed, and inferred therefrom that the Cross Lay of which fragments were inscribed on the Ruthwell monument was the work of Caedmon, “the Milton of North England in the seventh century.”  But according to the evidence of the latest expert who has examined the cross, Caedmon’s name has never been on it, and both linguistic and archaeological considerations assign the inscription to the tenth century, and probably to the latter half of it.  This critic declares that there is “no shadow of proof or probability that the inscription represents a poem written by Caedmon.”

Sweet, on the other hand* describes The Dream of the Rood, in the Vercelli Book, as an introduction to the Elene or Finding of the Cross which is unmistakably claimed as Cynewulf’s own by an acrostic introduced into the runic letters which form his name, and goes on to assert that the Ruthwell Cross gives a fragment of the poem in the Old Northern dialect of the seventh or eighth century, “of which the Ms. text is evidently a late West Saxon transcription differing in many respects from the older one.”  He considers that The Dream belongs to the age of Caedmon, and that the poetry of Cynewulf was an adaptation of older compositions.

* Anglo-Saxon Reader, p. 154, 7th edition.