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
BEOWULF(!). 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 Wuelker
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.
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