Old English hæleð and the authorship of The Dream of the Rood

ABSTRACTThis article identifies and analyzes new evidence for the theory that The Dream of the Rood is a product of composite authorship. An examination of the attestations of the word hæleð in the corpus of Old English poetry reveals that vocative uses of this word are found only in The Order of the World, Judith, Andreas, Elene, and the second half of The Dream of the Rood. The restriction of the vocative use of hæleð to these works is shown to substantiate the theory of composite authorship for The Dream of the Rood and associate the poem’s second half with the Cynewulfian school of poetic composition.KEYWORDS: The Dream of the RoodhæleðauthorshipCynewulf AcknowledgmentsI thank Professor Leonard Neidorf, Zixuan Wei, Kexin Zhang, and Chenyun Zhu for reading this work in draft and assisting me with the composition of it.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Among several dozen stylistic inconsistencies, three are especially salient and deserve mentioning at the outset: the disappearance of hypermetric lines (Fleming Citation1966: 55), longer and difficult-to-divide sentences (Lee Citation1972: 470), and the absence of vivid imagery (Burrow Citation1959: 132) in the second half of the poem.2 This edition was originally published in 1934. Scholars prior to them, Albert S. Cook for instance, also perceived that the poem contained interpolations, see Cook Citation1905: xlii.3 See Burrow (Citation1959: 130); Burlin (Citation1968: 42); Patten (Citation1968: 385); Lee (Citation1972); and Swanton (Citation1996: 77).4 See, for instance, Orton (Citation2000: 160); and Neidorf (Citation2016).5 See Hieatt (Citation1971).6 Citations of Old English poems refer to the editions of Krapp and Dobbie (Citation1931–53), The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records. Translations of The Dream of the Rood are cited throughout from Clayton (Citation2013).7 In this note, Neidorf points out that in the second half of the poem ‘there is a steep decline in the incidence of verses that begin with a finite verb’ (95) and thus proposes that ‘at least two authors with distinct compositional tendencies contributed to its transmitted text’ (96).8 For the comprehensive data for hæleð, see Appendix.9 The translation is cited from Bjork (Citation2014).10 The translation is cited from Hamer (Citation2015).11 All translations of Andreas are cited from Clayton (Citation2013).12 The translation is cited from Bjork (Citation2013).13 See Timmer (Citation1966); Cassidy and Ringer (Citation1974: 346); Griffith (Citation1997: 47); and Orchard (Citation2006).14 See Bjork (Citation2013: x–xviii).15 For the identification of this frame and the conventional use of it, see Louviot (Citation2016: 163; Citation2018: 283–284). I would like to thank the anonymous referee for calling my attention to this point and making my argument stronger.16 See Kemble (Citation1840: 362–3); Thorpe (Citation1842: 501); Dietrich (Citation1865); and Cook (Citation1905: xl). However, the theory of Cynewulf’s authorship was contested by Friedrich Adolf Ebert in 1884, but more than half of the stylistic difference from the Cynewulfian poetry enumerated by Ebert concentrate on the first half of The Dream of the Rood, which vindicates the hypothesis of the composite authorship from another perspective. See Cook (Citation1905: xxviii–xxix).17 See Cook (Citation1905: 39); Swanton (Citation1996: 130). For an elucidation on the parallels among the three poems, see Orchard (Citation2009).Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the Postgraduate Research & Practice Innovation Program of Jiangsu Province [KYCX22_0049].Notes on contributorsNa XuNa Xu is affiliated at Department of English in Nanjing University and its located in Nanjing, China.