It is good, but not very good.
The older part, if my conjecture be right, is the best, and its
reworking by Cynewulf has so broken it up that its dignity is much
damaged. The shaping is rude, but the imagination has indeed shaped
it." ten Brink says (p. 53): "Cynewulf himself has immortalized this
vision in a poem, giving utterance to an irrepressible emotion, but
still exhibiting the delicate lines of a beautifully designed
composition." The other Germans are usually so taken up with technical
and mechanical questions that they leave no room for aesthetic
considerations. Whether Cynewulf wrote the poem or not,--and the
probabilities favor his authorship, though we may not hesitate to say
with Morley, "I don't know,"--it is certainly the work of a gifted
Christian poet, who reverences the cross as the means of the redemption
of mankind.
This brief Introduction will, it is hoped, be sufficient to interest the
reader in the accompanying translations of some of the finest pieces of
Old English poetry that remain to us from the eighth, ninth, and tenth
centuries. The earlier period was the golden age of Old English poetry
in the Northumbrian dialect, which poetry, there is good reason to
think, was copied into the West-Saxon dialect, and it now remains to us
only in that form; for, when the Northmen harried Northumbria, destroyed
its monasteries, massacred its inhabitants, and settled in its homes,
manuscripts perished, and the light of learning in Western Europe was
extinguished.
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