The Dream of the Rood | Monica Brzezinski (essay date 1988)
Monica Brzezinski (essay date 1988)
SOURCE: "The Harrowing of Hell, the Last Judgment, and The Dream of the Rood," in Neuphilologische Mitteilungen: Bulletin de la Socieété Néophilologique, Vol. LXXXIX, No. 3, 1988, pp. 252-65.
[Below, Brzezinski contends that the last few lines of The Dream of the Rood refer to the Last Judgment rather than to the Harrowing of Hell.]
The narrative structure of The Dream of the Rood has been described as a Chinese box-like arrangement in which the Dreamer's first-person report of his vision frames the speech of the Rood, which in turn encloses a description of the passion of Christ. This neat equation of the Dream's structure with that of a Russian doll is, however, inadequate, as it neglects the concluding lines of the poem: the nested narratives are followed by a puzzling eight-and-a-half line coda which has been traditionally identified as "a brief and...
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