Dream Of The Rood Essay

“The Dream of the Rood” is a poem about Jesus’ crucifixion from the perspective of the cross and a dreamer. This poem is important because it tells the salvation story of an individual and the entire world, reveals the heavy cost of redemption, and displays a Christian before, during, and after a terrible time of affliction. This poem is considered the greatest Anglo-Saxon religious poem (Greenblatt 32). It begins with a dreamer who sees a rood in his dream. The dreamer notices there is blood on

“The Dream of the Rood”, is a story told of the crucifixion from the point of view of the cross. The story recounts through a dream vision and exemplifies the experiences the cross went through in the carrying of Christ. In this period the transfer to Christianity from Paganism was underway. In “The Dream of Rood”, the Rood tells his version of the tale through dream vision which assisted in keeping the interest and main pagan traditional concepts of the people while interweaving the viewpoints of

The Dream of the Rood is one of the earliest poems of the Old English literary movement. A dream-poem of just 156 lines in length, the text has transcended time and shown to still present new context for readers and inspire generations even now in the twenty-first century. Verbal parallels, alliterative verse and heroic eloquence are a few of the trademarks of the text that contribute to this legacy. It is the complex structure of the poem, however, that offers several shifts in narration and when

“The Dream of the Rood” In “The Dream of the Rood”, the unknown poet uses lines 125-156 to develop the theme of triumph achieved by Christ as a warrior king, bringing the dreamer to realize there is hope for a better life after death. The poet develops these notions by the use of heroic diction, symbolism, and irony. These lines are significant to the text as a whole because they allow the dreamer to summarize the sermon of salvation that the rood has preached. They also mark the change of reaction

without using symbols. Nonetheless even these writers differed greatly in their portrayal of Christ's sacrifice. Among these, William Langland, who wrote Piers Plowman, and the poet who penned “Dream of the Rood” both discuss Christ's sacrifice vividly and poetically. While Piers Plowman and “Dream of the Rood” share many similarities in their portrayal of Christ

fatigue and weakness, the poet shows that Christ was an ultimate hero.The "The Dream of the Rood's" description of Christ's burial also reflects the unique image of Christ in medieval times.

The Dream of the Rood is by an unknown, Anglo-Saxon, author. This ancient poem is about Jesus being crucified through the cross’ point of view. Although this poem is about Jesus’ death, it does not exactly match up with what the Bible has depicted in the Gospels of the New Testament. There is a culture clash between the Anglo-Saxon culture and beliefs and what the Bible thinks of Jesus during his crucifixion. In this poem the author expresses Christ as strong, heroic, and bold, but the Bible states

The imagery of the cross in The Dream of the Rood, reveal its many guises, from heavenly battle standard or sword, to tree and instrument of torture, from a female bride in the crucifixion to genderless emblem of the Lord’s might. Each transformation shows how the cross was adapted to serve the narrative’s requirement which was to reconcile the heroic Germanic tradition with Christianity. The dreamer describes the cross as a weapon, the use of warfare imagery intended as a persuasive device for

Within this essay, I will analyze the symbolism of the tree in the poem The Dream of the Rood in the first 24 lines, excerpted above. The tree in this section represents the way the story of Christ is portrayed to pagan communities. This portrayal differs from the story told in the Bible in that it depicts Christ as a distinguished and opulent figure, not a humble figure as the Bible knows him to be; this is in order to appeal to a pagan audience. In keeping with biblical teaching, however, the tree

‘The Dream of the Rood’ has been marveled as one of the finest religious poems from the Anglo-Saxon time period. The poem itself shows the contrast between the Pagan religion and Christianity and the overlap of religious symbols between them. It follows the crucifixion of Jesus and the dreamer’s journey to finding faith. The rood is seen as the backbone of the crucifixion and is depicted as being praised more than Christ. Using the literary devices of kenning and alliteration the author highlights