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Page 4
I. The ELENE, or Helena, is a poem on the expedition of the Empress
Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor, to
Palestine in search of the true cross, and its successful issue. The
medi�val legend of the Finding of the Cross is given in the _Acta
Sanctorum_ under date of May 4, assigned by the Church to the
commemoration of St. Helena's marvellous discovery. The Latin work is
the Life of St. Quiriacus, or Cyriacus, Bishop of Jerusalem, that is,
the Judas of the poem. It has been usually thought that the Old English
poet used this Life as his source; but Gl�de, in a recent volume of
_Anglia_ (IX. 271 ff.), has given reasons for thinking that the poet
used some other Latin text. He rejects ten Brink's conjecture that the
legend of Elene had come to England in a Greek form. As to the author of
the poem, we know his name, but very little else about him. He has left
us his name, imbedded in runic letters as an acrostic, in the last canto
of the poem, q.v. These letters spell the word CYNEWULF; but who was
Cynewulf? The question is hard to answer, and has given rise to much
discussion, which cannot be gone into here. A good summary of it will be
found in W�lker's _Grundriss zur Geschichte der Angels�chsischen
Litteratur_ (p. 147 ff., 1885), an indispensable work for students of
Old English literature. The old view, propounded in the infancy of
Anglo-Saxon studies, and held by Kemble, Thorpe, and, doubtfully,
Wright, that he was the Abbot of Peterborough and Bishop of Winchester
(992-1008), has been abandoned by all scholars, so far as I know, except
Professor Earle of Oxford (see his "Anglo-Saxon Literature," p. 228).
The later view of Leo, Dietrich, Grein and Rieger, our chief
authorities, that he was a Northumbrian, and of Dietrich and Grein, that
he was Bishop of Lindisfarne (737-780), has more to be said for it.
Sweet and ten Brink also hold that he was a Northumbrian of the eighth
century, but not the Bishop of Lindisfarne, while W�lker regards him as
a West-Saxon. Professor Henry Morley, in the current edition of his
"English Writers," has devoted a chapter (Vol. II. Chap. IX., 1888) to
Cynewulf, and virtually concludes that we know nothing about him except
that he was a poet and probably lived in the eighth century. We shall
not go far wrong in regarding him as a Northumbrian poet of the eighth
century, possibly the Bishop of Lindisfarne, even though his works
remain to us only in the West-Saxon dialect. As in the ELENE, so in the
CHRIST and the JULIANA, Cynewulf has left us his name, hence all agree
in ascribing to him these poems at least. To these some of the RIDDLES,
if not all, are usually added, but this is now contested. Other poems,
as the GUTHLAC, PHOENIX, CHRIST'S DESCENT INTO HELL, ANDREAS, DREAM OF
THE ROOD, and several other shorter poems, have been ascribed to him
with more or less probability, and very recently Sarrazin (in _Anglia_,
IX. 515 ff.) would credit him with the authorship of even the
B�OWULF(!). We might as well assign to him, as has been suggested, all
the poems in the two great manuscripts, the Exeter Book and the Vercelli
Book, and be done with it. It is desirable that his authorship of the
DREAM OF THE ROOD, which ten Brink and Sweet assign to him, but W�lker
rejects, should be proved or disproved; for with this is connected the
question of his Northumbrian origin, and some lines from this poem have
been inscribed in the Northumbrian dialect on the Ruthwell Cross in
Dumfriesshire.
However it may be, a poet named Cynewulf wrote the ELENE, and thereby
left us one of the finest Old English poems that time has preserved, on
a subject that was of great interest to Christian Europe. A collection
of "Legends of the Holy Rood" has been issued by the Early English Text
Society (ed. Morris, 1871), from the Anglo-Saxon period to Caxton's
translation of the _Legenda Aurea_; but they are arranged without
system, and no study has been made of the date and relation of the
several forms of the story. If Cynewulf made use of the Latin Life of
Cyriacus in the _Acta Sanctorum_, he expanded his source considerably
and showed great skill and originality in his treatment of the subject,
as may be seen by comparing the translation with the Latin text in
Zupitza's third edition of the ELENE (1888), or in Professor Kent's
forthcoming American edition, after Zupitza. The Old English text was
discovered by a German scholar, Dr. F. Blume, at Vercelli, Italy, in
1822, and the manuscript has since become well known as the Vercelli
Book (cf. W�lker's _Grundriss_, p. 237 ff.). A reasonable conjecture as
to how this MS. reached Vercelli may be found in Professor Cook's
pamphlet, "Cardinal Guala and the Vercelli Book." A Bibliography of the
ELENE will be found in W�lker, Zupitza, and Kent. English translations
have been made by Kemble, in his edition of the Codex Vercellensis
(1856), and very recently by Dr. R.F. Weymouth, Acton, England, after
Zupitza's text (privately printed, 1888). A German translation will be
found in Grein's _Dichtungen der Angelsachsen_ (II. 104 ff., 1859), and
of lines 1-275 in K�rner's _Einleitung in das Studium des
Angels�chsischen_ (p. 147 ff., 1880). A good summary of the poem is
given in Earle's "Anglo-Saxon Literature" (p. 234 ff., 1884), and a
briefer one in Morley's "English Writers" (II. 196 ff.).
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