1. C. L. Wrenn, A Study of Old English Literature (New York: Norton and
Company, Incorporated, 1967), p. 34.
2. M. W. Grose and D. McKenna, Old English Literature (Totowa, New Jersey:
Rowman and Littlefield, 1973), p. 90.
3. Wrenn, p. 103.
4. J. B. Trapp, Medieval English Literature (New York: Oxford University Press,
1973), p. 114.
5. Stanley B. Greenfield, A Critical History of Old English Literature (New
York:
New York University Press, 1965), pp. 138-139.
6. George K. Anderson, Old and Middle English Literature (New York: Collier
Books, 1965), p. 35.
7. David Wright, tr., Beowulf (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1957), p. 9.
8. Wright, p. 9.
9. Alvin A. Lee, "Toward a Critique of The Dream of the Rood," in
Anglo-Saxon Poetry: Essays in Appreciation, ed. Lewis E. Nicholson and Dolores
Warwick Frese
(Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), pp. 167-168.
10. Although Julian Jaynes does not use Anglo-Saxon mentality as an example, the
thought processes of this heroic age echo his idea (expressed in The Origin of Consciousness
in the Breakdown of the Bi-Cameral Mind) that the left and right cerebral hemispheres were
only feebly connected by a not-fully-
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developed
corpus callosum at this primitive time in human history. Hence, the left brain often did not know
what the right brain was doing, and vice versa, allowing for such mind-bending experiences as
hallucinations and visionary revelations from an imagined outside-the-body force, such as a dead
ancestor, a spirit, a demon, or a god. We have just seen that Anglo-Saxon syntax in such uses as
"it thought me," or "what dreamed me" is a candid admission of object-dominated thought.
When the alternating right-brain/left-brain impulses meld into a
total experience something new emerges consciousness. That is true also in the emotion of the
dream (right brain) and the later telling and objectifying of it (left brain) in "The Dream of the
Cross." Here the impulses become a new resolution that rests on both bases realization of
spiritual duty.
11. Lines 23-25 of "A Dream of the Cross," translated by Charles W. Kennedy, reprinted
from Early English Christian Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963) for
The Literature of Medieval England, ed. by D.W. Robertson, Jr. (New York:
McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1970).
12. Lee, p. 164.
13. Lee, p. 163.
