"English Writers," has devoted a chapter (Vol. II. Chap. IX., 1888) to
Cynewulf, and virtually concludes that we know nothing about him except
that he was a poet and probably lived in the eighth century. We shall
not go far wrong in regarding him as a Northumbrian poet of the eighth
century, possibly the Bishop of Lindisfarne, even though his works
remain to us only in the West-Saxon dialect. As in the ELENE, so in the
CHRIST and the JULIANA, Cynewulf has left us his name, hence all agree
in ascribing to him these poems at least. To these some of the RIDDLES,
if not all, are usually added, but this is now contested. Other poems,
as the GUTHLAC, PHOENIX, CHRIST'S DESCENT INTO HELL, ANDREAS, DREAM OF
THE ROOD, and several other shorter poems, have been ascribed to him
with more or less probability, and very recently Sarrazin (in _Anglia_,
IX. 515 ff.) would credit him with the authorship of even the
BÉOWULF(!). We might as well assign to him, as has been suggested, all
the poems in the two great manuscripts, the Exeter Book and the Vercelli
Book, and be done with it. It is desirable that his authorship of the
DREAM OF THE ROOD, which ten Brink and Sweet assign to him, but Wülker
rejects, should be proved or disproved; for with this is connected the
question of his Northumbrian origin, and some lines from this poem have
been inscribed in the Northumbrian dialect on the Ruthwell Cross in
Dumfriesshire.

However it may be, a poet named Cynewulf wrote the ELENE, and thereby
left us one of the finest Old English poems that time has preserved, on
a subject that was of great interest to Christian Europe. A collection
of "Legends of the Holy Rood" has been issued by the Early English Text
Society (ed. Morris, 1871), from the Anglo-Saxon period to Caxton's
translation of the _Legenda Aurea_; but they are arranged without
system, and no study has been made of the date and relation of the
several forms of the story. If Cynewulf made use of the Latin Life of