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Cynewulf encourages his listeners to remain committed to the Christian life, by reminding them of the reward that awaits them.
What shines out of every page of the New Testament is the promise of eternal life. In Christ, a narrative poem written in Old English sometime around 800, the poet Cynewulf drew together a number of Scriptural quotations to remind his listeners of the reward that awaits those who do not turn aside.
The lives of men are like voyages across stormy seas, but we no longer have to sail them as if they were uncharted waters.
Christ is a long narrative poem by Cynewulf, a poet writing in Old English at the turn of the ninth century, about seventy years after the death of St Bede. In the following extract, he likens human life to the tossing of ships on stormy seas, and the Christian gospel as a chart to bring our ‘sea-steeds’ safely to heaven’s harbour.
Like the legendary phoenix, the Christian must spend his life making a nest fit for his rebirth in fire.
In The Phoenix, the author (possibly Cynewulf, certainly an admirer of his work) mused on the legend of the firebird that dies in its nest, and is reborn in fire. A godly man builds himself a nest out of his repentance and his love and charity with all men; in life the nest protects him from spiritual enemies, and in death the nest is consumed in fire so that the man may be reborn in a mansion of glory.
Cuthbert, struck down by plague, was vexed to find that his brethren had been praying for him all the previous night.
When the monastery at Ripon was founded in 661, Cuthbert served there under Abbot Eata. Eata clung loyally to a peculiar and not very accurate way of dating Easter borrowed from Ireland, and three years later King Oswy, who preferred the calendar used in Canterbury, Rome and the East, appointed Wilfrid in Eata’s stead. Cuthbert returned to the Abbey at Melrose in the Scottish borders.
Anglo-Saxon poet Cynewulf reminds us that God’s gifts to men are many and varied, and nobody ever gets them all.
‘Now there are diversities of gifts,’ St Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 12, ‘but the same Spirit.’ Cynewulf (possibly the eighth-century bishop Cynewulf of Lindisfarne) confirms that the gifts given by God to mankind are many and different, and also explains why it is that no one should expect to be good at everything.
The young Christian from ancient Northumbria was healed of a lame leg in a manner that reminded Bede of the archangel Rafael.
As a small boy, Cuthbert had been approached at playtime by a toddler who told him in the most grown-up fashion to cultivate mind as well as body. Some years later, though long before he became a monk, another unearthly visitor came by.