Chapter 3 - Sounds of the Last Judgment in Christ C

Summary

IN TERMS OF its evocative power and poetic craftsmanship, Christ C is one of the most interesting poems in the entire Old English poetic corpus. Found on folios 21v–31v in the Exeter Book, this exceptional poem of 798 lines was once considered the final portion of the so-called Christ, a 1664-line composition on the life of Christ, which was often attributed to Cynewulf. However, scholars now agree that Christ is composed of three distinct works, in accordance with the major structural divisions indicated in the manuscript: The Advent Lyrics (also known as Christ A), Cynewulf's poem on Christ's ascension (Christ B), and Christ C, which takes as its subject the Second Coming of Christ on Judgment Day. While Christ in Judgment, the title employed by Bernard Muir and Mary Clayton in their editions of the text, is surely a more appropriate title for the work than Christ C, the latter and its variant, Christ III, remain the most-used titles for the poem, and I employ the title Christ C throughout this book.

This poem, which, on linguistic and metrical grounds, appears to belong with the early, so-called “Cædmonian group,” is a multifaceted vision of the Last Judgment. From its exordium, in which angels, saints, and Christ all arrive on earth on the last day, to the vision of eternal peace which concludes the poem, Christ C is sublimely imagined and outstandingly composed. It derives much of its language and imagery from a variety of patristic and homiletic sources—much of which may stem back ultimately to Ephraem Syrus's sermon The Day of Judgment—but the primary source is Scripture. Yet even the poem's basis in Scripture is relatively slight: biblical words were potent seeds to the poet's fertile imagination, and the majority of the poem is an exuberant outgrowth of these seeds. For our purposes, Christ C is especially striking for three reasons. First, it places strong emphasis on sound, which makes it an ideal object for the type of analysis undertaken in this book. Second, the poem includes three representations of Jesus speaking on Judgment Day, and the second and longest of the three speeches is particularly remarkable for its outstanding concentration of special poetic effects.