Cynewulf
flourished 9th century ad, Northumbria or Mercia
[now in England]
Author of four Old English poems preserved in
late 10th-century manuscripts. Elene and The
Fates of the Apostles are in the Vercelli Book,
and The Ascension (which forms the second part
of a trilogy, Christ, and is also called Christ
II) and Juliana are in the Exeter Book. An
epilogue to each poem, asking for prayers for
the author, contains runic characters
representing the letters c, y, n, (e), w, u, l,
f, which are thought to spell his name. A rhymed
passage in the Elene shows that Cynewulf wrote
in the Northumbrian or Mercian dialect. Nothing
is known of him outside his poems, as there is
no reason to identify him with any of the
recorded persons bearing this common name. He
may have been a learned cleric since all of the
poems are based on Latin sources.
Elene, a poem of 1,321 lines, is an
account of the finding of the True Cross by St.
Helena.
The
Fates of the Apostles, 122 lines, is a
versified martyrology describing the mission and
death of each of the Twelve Apostles.
Christ II (The Ascension) is a lyrical
version of a homily on the Ascension written by
Pope Gregory I the Great. It is part of a
trilogy on Christ by different authors.
Juliana, a poem of 731 lines, is a retelling
of a Latin prose life of St. Juliana, a maiden
who rejected the suit of a Roman prefect,
Eleusius, because of her faith and consequently
was made to suffer numerous torments.
Although
the poems do not have great power or
originality, they are more than mere
paraphrases. Imagery from everyday Old English
life and from the Germanic epic tradition
enlivens descriptions of battles and sea
voyages. At the same time, the poet, a careful
and skillful craftsman, consciously applies the
principles of Latin rhetoric to achieve a
clarity and orderly narrative progress that is
quite unlike the confusion and circumlocution of
the native English style.
