works. He adds to the poem a personal note, signing his name in runes; and,
if we accept the wonderful "Vision of the Rood" as Cynewulf's work, we
learn how he found the cross at last in his own heart. There is a
suggestion here of the future Sir Launfal and the search for the Holy
Grail.

DECLINE OF NORTHUMBRIAN LITERATURE. The same northern energy which had
built up learning and literature so rapidly in Northumbria was instrumental
in pulling it down again. Toward the end of the century in which Cynewulf
lived, the Danes swept down on the English coasts and overwhelmed
Northumbria. Monasteries and schools were destroyed; scholars and teachers
alike were put to the sword, and libraries that had been gathered leaf by
leaf with the toil of centuries were scattered to the four winds. So all
true Northumbrian literature perished, with the exception of a few
fragments, and that which we now possess[35] is largely a translation in
the dialect of the West Saxons. This translation was made by Alfred's
scholars, after he had driven back the Danes in an effort to preserve the
ideals and the civilization that had been so hardly won. With the conquest
of Northumbria ends the poetic period of Anglo-Saxon literature. With
Alfred the Great of Wessex our prose literature makes a beginning.


ALFRED (848-901)

"Every craft and every power soon grows
old and is passed over and forgotten, if it
be without wisdom.... This is now to be
said, that whilst I live I wish to live nobly,
and after life to leave to the men who come
after me a memory of good works."[36]