Elene has for its subject-matter the finding of the true cross.  It tells of Constantine’s vision of the Rood, on the eve of battle.  After his victory under the new emblem he sends his mother Helena (Elene) to Jerusalem in search of the original cross and the nails.  The poem, which is of very uneven quality, might properly be put at the end of Cynewulf’s works.  He adds to the poem a personal note, signing his name in runes; and, if we accept the wonderful “Vision of the Rood” as Cynewulf’s work, we learn how he found the cross at last in his own heart.  There is a suggestion here of the future Sir Launfal and the search for the Holy Grail.

DECLINE OF NORTHUMBRIAN LITERATURE.  The same northern energy which had built up learning and literature so rapidly in Northumbria was instrumental in pulling it down again.  Toward the end of the century in which Cynewulf lived, the Danes swept down on the English coasts and overwhelmed Northumbria.  Monasteries and schools were destroyed; scholars and teachers alike were put to the sword, and libraries that had been gathered leaf by leaf with the toil of centuries were scattered to the four winds.  So all true Northumbrian literature perished, with the exception of a few fragments, and that which we now possess[35] is largely a translation in the dialect of the West Saxons.  This translation was made by Alfred’s scholars, after he had driven back the Danes in an effort to preserve the ideals and the civilization that had been so hardly won.  With the conquest of Northumbria ends the poetic period of Anglo-Saxon literature.  With Alfred the Great of Wessex our prose literature makes a beginning.

ALFRED (848-901)

“Every craft and every power soon grows old and is passed over and forgotten, if it be without wisdom....  This is now to be said, that whilst I live I wish to live nobly, and after life to leave to the men who come after me a memory of good works."[36]

So wrote the great Alfred, looking back over his heroic life.  That he lived nobly none can doubt who reads the history of the greatest of Anglo-Saxon kings; and his good works include, among others, the education of half a country, the salvage of a noble native literature, and the creation of the first English prose.

LIFE AND TIMES OF ALFRED. For the history of Alfred’s times, and details of the terrific struggle with the Northmen, the reader must be referred to the histories.  The struggle ended with the Treaty of Wedmore, in 878, with the establishment of Alfred not only as king of Wessex, but as overlord of the whole northern country.  Then the hero laid down his sword, and set himself as a little child to learn to read and write Latin, so that he might lead his people in peace as he had led them in war.  It is then that Alfred began to be the heroic figure in literature that he had formerly been in the wars against the Northmen.