ABSTRACT
As has been said elsewhere many poems have been attributed to Cynewulf by one scholar or another of which his authorship cannot be proved because the runes are absent. Of these the one perhaps most generally given to him is the Dream of the Rood. It is in the Vercelli MS., where it is divided from the Elene by four sermons. In it the Cross is represented as appearing to the poet in a dream, and giving an account of the Crucifixion in which it had played an unwilling part. Another poem often ascribed to Cynewulf is Guþlac, the story of the temptation and death of the hermit Guþlac of Croyland. Another work, earlier thought to be by Cynewulf, is the Phoenix. This is a very free translation of a Latin work of the fourth century, usually attributed to Lactantius, in which the Old English poet has made 380 verses out of the 170 hexameters of the Latin poem.
