The Dream of the Rood and the Ruthwell monument

Abstract

In this fifth and final chapter, I want to pay attention to the other side of assemblage -that is, the way that things break up and break away. The poem (or poems) usually referred to as The Dream of the Rood is a fragile thing that has been, and in a sense asks to be, broken apart and pieced back together time and again. It is not a coherent whole, in any of its forms, but an elusive assortment -at once breakage and assemblage -that invites us to participate in its ongoing process of becoming.I will start by closely analysing the poem as it exists in the Vercelli Book manuscript, carrying out a reading of the text in light of thing theory, looking at how the various things represented in the poem (tree, beam, beacon, gallows, rood, body) transform one another, but how they also shift and shape the human 'dreamer' as he speaks his vision. I will acknowledge the riddle-like nature of this poem yet contend that this is nevertheless a riddle without a solution. This point is crucial because it is their resistance to objectification that imbues these items with thing-power. They will not be resolved and therefore dissolved, but go on breaking, failing, merging, re-emerging and reanimating themselves. Although we are dealing with marred or disused materials here (an uprooted tree, a stained cross, a discarded gallows, a bloodied, buried body) these things are associated through their fragile but changeable nature; they gain an agency beyond their original 'usefulness' and form a vibrant, self-altering assemblage.In discussing the 'agency of assemblages' Bennett has highlighted the fact that in any congregation or meshwork there is a 'friction and violence between parts' so that assemblages are 'living, throbbing confederations that are able to function despite the persistent presence of energies that confound them from within'. 1 As such, when looking at how things are assembled in a poem like The Dream, we need to attend not only to the way in which the bits