ABSTRACT
Nearly all Old English poetry is anonymous. One poet, however, had a habit of signing his verses, and from these signatures we know his name: Cynewulf.1
His motive was not vainglory but (as he himself explains) hope that those who liked his poems would name him in their prayers. The signatures took the form of runes, woven in the verses towards the end but not at the very end of a given poem. From them we learn that the poet spelt his name indifferently Cynewulf and Cynwulf. Since he did not use the spelling Cyniwulf we infer that he lived after weak medial i had become e. The date of this sound-shift varies with the dialect. Other linguistic evidence, however, marks Cynewulf an Angle, and only the Northumbrian and Mercian dialects need be considered. Northumbrian weak i was kept until the middle of the ninth century, while Mercian variants with e appear early in that century, and this e may go back to the last years of the eighth. The earliest possible time for Cynewulf, then, is the last quarter of the eighth century, and the ninth makes a safer date. Of the man we know nothing except what we glean from his work. We have four poems of his: a list, a sermon, and two legends (i.e., saints’ lives). We take them in the order given.
