Reading, writing and resurrection: Cynewulf's runes as a figure of the body

Abstract

Cynewulf's runic signatures have long been understood as a playful means of preserving the poet's name, resembling Latin anagrams or the scrambled runes of Old English riddles. This essay re-evaluates the signatures' function, arguing that their form graphically enacts the concerns about the body, death and salvation that saturate each of Cynewulf's epilogues. When read through the lens of the common medieval grammatical analogy that equates the word's letters to the body and the word's meaning to the soul, the scattered letters of the signatures become a figure of Cynewulf's broken and sinful body; like the worm-eaten flesh described in the epilogue to Fates, Cynewulf's own name is reduced to its most elemental form. The reader's reassembly and comprehension of the dismembered signature as the name CYN(E)WULF thus create a simulacrum of the reconstituted body and its reunion with the soul at the resurrection, anticipating the salvation that Cynewulf asks his readers to help secure with their prayers.