SOURCE: Joseph Wittig, "Figural Narrative in Cynewulf's Juliana," in Anglo-Saxon: England, Cambridge University Press, Vol. 4, 1975, pp. 37-55.

In the following essay, Wittig claims that the critical "dissatisfaction" with Cynewulf's Juliana neglects the poem's successful representation of the significance of the saint's passion.

Old English saints' lives, as a group, have not generated a great deal of critical enthusiasm; and Cynewulf's Juliana has often been regarded as the worst of a bad lot. One of the poem's recent editors sees in it a 'uniformity verging on monotony' and finds it 'unrelieved by any emotional or rhetorical emphasis or by any other gradations in tone'.¹ While critics concede that all Cynewulf's signed poems have a smooth texture and contain 'fine passages', they regard Juliana as something of an embarrassment and generally assign it to the poet's adolescence—or senescence.²

In her article on saints' lives in a recent survey of...