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Christian Traditional Themes and the Cynewulfian Sociolect in Old English Verse

Abstract:Much has been written about traditional themes in Old English verse, but specifically Christian themes have not been discussed. The present essay provides a framework for analyzing Old English religious themes—distinguishing them from the topoi traced by source studies—and then applies this to a theme I call "The Open Heavens." This theme occurs a total of seven times in four Old English poems. Scholarship has traditionally linked three of these texts—Andreas, Christ and Satan, and Guthlac A—with the Cynewulf group. I argue that the formulas and themes shared by the Cynewulfian poems witness a common poetic sociolect, a tradition within the tradition. Cynewulf is the most important author working within this subtradition, but, as this study of "The Open Heavens" theme illustrates, he did not originate it. While Cynewulf's works show a familiarity with the theme, they do not contain a clear-cut instance of it; thus, Andreas, Christ and Satan, and Guthlac A cannot have derived "The Open Heavens" from him. Other Christian themes await discovery, and, like "The Open Heavens," these have much to tell us about the development of the Old English poetic tradition.