Labor Link 2

The Work of Warriors in the "Dream of the Rood"

Though the "Dream of the Rood" is probably a monastic text, the labors that are explicitly depicted in the poem are those not of the second estate, but of the first (remember that the first estate is made up of those who fight and rule). Most scholars believe that a key scene in the poem occurs when Christ mounts up on the cross as an active hero rather than the passive sacrificial lamb of much medieval iconography.

What sort of work did members of the first estate actually do in the Anglo-Saxon period? You can approach this question in two ways.

1. The literary approach: using the Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (look in the reference section under Bosworth Toller) or the Concordance to the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records (next to Bosworth-Toller in the reference section) determine what other poems "gestigan," the Anglo-Saxon word for "mount up" appears. Some of these poems are in our Crossley-Holland anthology (Beowulf, for instance). Find one or two occurrences of "gestigan" and describe the poetic context of this word. How does your knowing this context affect your reading of the "Dream of the Rood"?
2. The material approach: using the Dictionary of the Middle Ages and one other source from the library, determine how people actually fought in the Anglo-Saxon period. What sorts of weapons did they use? How were they organized? What sorts of training or practice did they have to perform?

For either approach, write up the results of your inquiry into a one-page paper.

1/98