The Rood on Holy Saturday

For a few years — and in marked joy, unlike the last two days — I have read “The Dream of the Rood” on Holy Saturday, and have blogged (2004, 2005, 2009) encouraging others to consider the same.

To recap, it’s a heroic Germanic retelling of the Passion from the Old English; the narrator, through a dream, is the cross itself. I think Christ-as-hero, and an effort to interpret the Gospel in a distinct (and to us, alien) cultural setting is a useful and important thing.

Adding a link to another source of the text, and it’s “nice” that the site upholds medieval web standards.

By Scott Wells

Scott Wells, 46, is a Universalist Christian minister doing Universalist theology and church administration hacks in Washington, D.C.

3 comments

  1. I read the Boenig translation in “Anglo Saxon Spirituality,” from the Paulist Press series “Classics of Western Spirituality”. And played a little with actual translation of a few lines.

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