Christ I


Christ I is a fragmentary collection of Old English poems on the coming of Jesus as preserved in the Exeter Book. In its present state, the poem comprises 439 lines in twelve distinct sections. In the assessment of Edward B. Irving Jr, "two masterpieces stand out of the mass of Anglo-Saxon religious poetry: The Dream of the Rood and the sequence of liturgical lyrics in the Exeter Book... known as Christ I".
The topic of the poem is Advent, the time period in the annual liturgical cycle leading up to the anniversary of the coming of Jesus, a period of great spiritual and symbolic significance within the Christian churches — for some in early medieval Europe a time of fasting and the subject of a sermon by Gregory the Great. The Old English lyrics of Christ I, playing off the Latin antiphons, reflect on this period of symbolic preparation.

Manuscript and associated texts

Christ I is found on folios 8r-14r of the Exeter Book, a collection of Old English poetry today containing 123 folios. The collection also contains a number of other religious and allegorical poems. Some folios have been lost at the start of the poem, meaning that an indeterminate amount of the original composition is missing.
Christ I, concerning the Advent of Jesus, is followed in the Exeter Book by a poem on Jesus's Ascension composed by Cynewulf, generally known in modern scholarship as Christ II, which in turn is followed by Christ III, on the Last Judgment. Together these three poems comprise a total of 1664 lines and are in turn linked to the poems that follow, Guthlac A and Guthlac B. The sequence of Christ I-III is sometimes known simply as Christ and has at times been thought to be one poem completed by a single author. Linguistic and stylistic differences indicate, however, that Christ I-III originated as separate compositions, perhaps with Christ II being composed as a bridge between Christ I and Christ III). Nevertheless, Christ I-III stands as an artistically coherent compilation.
The text also contains glosses by Laurence Nowell from the sixteenth century or George Hickes from the seventeenth.

Origins

Because Christ II is signed by Cynewulf, earlier scholarship supposed that Christ I might also be his work; but recent research agrees that the authorship is unknown. Claes Schaar suggested that the poem may have been written between the end of the eighth century and the beginning of the ninth.

Sample

The following passage describes the Advent of Christ and is a modern English translation of Lyric 5 :

Interpretation of structure

The order of antiphons that the author uses for the lyrics imply that the poet was not concerned about any distinctions between antiphons, or the order that he had found them in his sources. Upon analysis of the position of each poem, no rational order can be found, suggesting that the order of each poem in the sequence is unimportant.

Influence on other writers

was influenced by the following lines from Christ I, which inspired his portrayal the character Eärendil in his legendarium and is one of many examples of the Old English word middangeard which partly inspired Tolkien's fantasy world:
Variants of lines inspired by these survived through multiple poetic and prose versions to be published in The Silmarillion where they appear as the greeting "Hail Eärendil, bearer of light before the Sun and Moon! Splendour of the Children of Earth, star in the darkness, jewel in the sunset, radiant in the morning!"
Tolkien wrote "There was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind those words, if I could grasp it, far beyond ancient English."

Editions and translations

Editions