The oldest-known example of Anglo-Saxon Christian poetry in English literature, “Dream of the Rood” is a doorway between wildly-different cultures and philosophies. While the poem’s themes are strongly Christian, its imagery recalls the Anglo-Saxon culture of warriors and knights, and its symbolism traces a continuity between Christianity and “pagan” traditions like the Celtic and the Norse. The tension between these sometimes-paradoxical schools of thought and images lends the poem great depth both as a literary and as a historical text. Using parallelisms, paradoxes, irony, and juxtaposition, the unknown poet creates a Christian poem reflective of its syncretic, vibrant time.

For ease of understanding, the long poem can be divided into three parts. In Part 1, the unnamed speaker directly addresses the reader and describes his dream and its subject: the tree or the “rood.” Part 2 is the speech of the rood, where the rood addresses the poem’s speaker, and through him, the reader. The final part of the poem sums up the poem’s messages.

The poem begins with “What,” (Line 1) establishing a rallying call to the listener. In this rhetorical

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