The composite authorship of The Dream of the Rood

Abstract

Abstract Scholarship on The Dream of the Rood has long entertained the suspicion that the poem might be the product of composite authorship. Recent criticism has tended to reject this possibility on aesthetic grounds, but the present article identifies new metrical and lexical reasons to believe that The Dream of the Rood contains contributions from at least two poets. It reconstructs the poem's textual history and contends that lines 1–77 represent an original core to which a later poet added lines 78–156.