Dating Old English poetry is a notoriously difficult task and one which has seen little agreement among scholars. With the exception of poems such as the Battle of Brunanburh which are tied to a datable event and embedded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the greater part of the corpus of Old English poetry remains undated. Some poems such as Beowulf have seen an enormous range of suggested dates, all canvassed with erudition and, often, passion.
A considerable range of linguistic tests for date have been suggested over the years but all have proved inconclusive. Those interested are referred to A.C.Amos, Linguistic Means of Determining the Dates of Old English Literary Texts, Medieval Academy Books no. 90, Cambridge, Mass. 1980. Amos points out the drawbacks to most of the so-called tests. K. Sisam, Cynewulf and his Poetry, Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture, Proceedings of the British Academy 43, 1933 had remarked earlier "Elaborate linguistic and metrical tests have been applied to establish the chronological order of Old English poems. Because these tests leave out of account differences of authorship, of locality, of subject, and of textual tradition, the detailed results whether of relative order or absolute date, are little better than guess-work hampered by statistics."
There are four areas which have been discussed in relation to the date of 'The Dream of the Rood':
i) the date of the MS, ii) the date of the Ruthwell Cross, iii) the date of "Cynewulfian" poetry, iv) appearance of portions of the True Cross in England. However, before working through these a general point should be made. It is assumed in this discussion that we are attempting to date the poem which occurs in the Vercelli Book. It has been suggested (as is demonstrated by Michael Alexander's translation) that this poem is a composite. There may have been an earlier version of the central portion but the text which exists in the Vercelli Book has a convincing structure as a whole and it is pointless to discuss the date of a hypothetical piece which does not exist rather than a poem which does.
i) The date of the MS: the MS is dated by most scholars to the mid 10th century. N.R. Ker, Catalogue of MSS containing Anglo-Saxon, Oxford 1957 gives second half of the 10th century, This would provide the latest possible date for our poem and it is probable that the poem did exist earlier than the MS. If nothing else, the errors (such as the break in the text at l.76 although there is no lacuna in the MS) would indicate that this text is a copy of an earlier one although how much earlier and how many copies intervene is difficult to determine.
ii) The date of the Ruthwell Cross: there has been considerable dispute over the date of the cross although recent opinion seems to favour 730-750. Those interested should consult Douglas MacLean, 'The Date of the Ruthwell Cross', in The Ruthwell Cross, ed. Brendan Cassidy, Princeton University 1992 and the extensive bibliography in this volume (see also Context and Images). The question remains of whether the runic inscription on the Cross is a quotation from our poem or whether our poem is a later development of the poem which is on the Cross (and that that is the inspiration for our poem) or whether they are both reflections of a third, lost work. The fact that the extracts on the Cross are all from the central portion of the poem, the description of the crucifixion and entombment, does not necessarily prove that the rest of the poem did not exist, simply that the rest is not appropriate to the scheme of the Ruthwell Cross. David Howlett in Cassidy's volume offers an interesting hypothesis of the relevance of the runic extracts to the decorative scheme of the Cross.
iii) "Cynewulfian" poetry: 'The Dream of the Rood' is no longer attributed to Cynewulf but it tends to be classed as Cynewulfian in style. There are numbers of instances quoted in the notes of phraseology similar to the signed Cynwulfian poems, 'Christ', 'Elene' and 'Juliana' and similarities to 'Andreas' which also occurs in the Vercelli Book. Again there have been considerable disputes about the date of Cynewulf. Sisam in the article cited above assigns Cynewulf to the ninth century but his arguments are not unassailable and the latter part of the eighth century seems equally possible.
iv) Relics of the True Cross: it has been suggested that the inspirational impetus for the poem might have come from the interest in the Cross roused by the appearance in England of a portion of the Cross as a relic. Dickens and Ross suggest that the presentation to Alfred could have been the occasion for "the revision of the poem".
The pieces of firm evidence for Cross relics in Anglo-Saxon England are a) 883-5 Pope Marinus presented King Alfred with a portion of the True Cross (recorded in Asser and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ( Laud - 883 "And pope Marinus sent the lignum Domini to king Alfred", 885 "And the same year passed away the good pope Marinus who freed 'the School of the English' from payment of dues at the request of Alfred, king of Wessex; and he sent him great gifts and a fragment of the cross on which Christ suffered; Parker has a similar entry for 885/4), b) 926 Hugh, "King of the Franks", when requesting his sister in marriage, presented King Athelstan (924-940) with a piece of the Cross enclosed in crystal together with a number of other relics - see the extract from William of Malmsbury in Analogues.
Clearly no firm conclusions on the date of the poem which exists in the Vercelli Book are possible. The discussions in Context on the metrics and on the language of the poem will also refer to aspects of dating.
Ann Squires
University of Durham, June 1994