“They Began to Sing Him a Sorhleoð”: Possible Echoes of the Anglo-Saxon Funerary Rites in ‘The Dream of the Rood’
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12775/APH.2019.120.01Keywords
Jesus Christ, Gospels, elegy, Old English poetry, The Dream of the Rood, BeowulfAbstract
The Dream of the Rood constitutes one of the most intriguing products of Old English literature, both in terms of its highly imaginative, heroicised depiction of Christ and the Cross and on account of its numerous Christian and pre-Christian intersec- tions. One of the most arresting issues in it, however, particularly as regards the poem’s cultural background, is its mention of a sorhleoð (l. 67), the ‘sorrow-song’, or ‘dirge’ that the disciples begin to sing once they have placed the body of the Saviour in the sepulchre. Given that there is no mention of any songs being chanted at the time of Christ’s burial in the canonical Gospels, it seems rational to suggest that the anonymous poet must have supplied this ‘missing’ information on the basis of his own, perhaps somewhat antiquarian, knowledge of the burial customs in Anglo-Saxon England.
References
The Catholic Bible: Revised Standard Version (San Francisco, 2006).
Dickins Bruce and Ross Alan S.C. (eds.), The Dream of the Rood (London, 1951).
Kroonen Guus, Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic (Leiden and Boston, 2013).
O’Brien O’Keeffe Katherine, ‘Values and Ethics in Heroic Literature’, in Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, Second Edition (Cambridge, 2014), 101–19.
Owen-Crocker Gale R., The Four Funerals in Beowulf and the Structure of the Poem (Manchester, 2009).
Pollington Stephen, Anglo-Saxon Burial Mounds. Princely Burials in the 6th and 7th Cen- turies (Swaffham, 2008).
Swanton Michael (ed.), The Dream of the Rood (Exeter, 2000).
Tacitus Publius Cornelius, Germania (Poznań, 2008).
Valsamis George (ed.), The New Testament: Original Greek (Koine) Text (Athens, 2012).
Webster Leslie, ‘Archaeology and Beowulf’, in Daniel Donoghue (ed.), Beowulf. A Verse Translation (New York and London, 2002), 212–23.
Wrenn Charles Leslie and French Bolton Whitney (eds.), Beowulf (Exeter, 1996).
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Title, logo and layout of journal are reserved trademarks of APH.Stats
Number of views and downloads: 375
Number of citations: 1