An Old English poem that probably dates from the eighth century can unsettle the modern reader, yet its retelling of the Easter story from the viewpoint of the Cross remains startlingly powerful

The discovery 200 years ago, in the cathedral library in Vercelli, in north-west Italy, of a late-tenth-­century Old English manuscript, was to lead to a decisive change in the way Christ’s Passion was perceived.

The manuscript included a poem known previously only from runic inscriptions on a stone cross at Ruthwell in Dumfriesshire. That poem was The Dream of the Rood, the earliest dream poem in Old English, an exhilarating meditation on the experience of the Crucifixion, told to the dreamer not by Christ or by Roman soldiers or any other spectator, but by the cross itself, the “rood” of the poem’s title: “no felon’s gallows”, in the poet’s words, but “the glorious tree of victory”.

Richard Dance, professor of early English at the University of Cambridge, describes “the cross acting, feeling and speaking as a first-hand witness to the Crucifixion in its own vivid and personal account”. And what a ­wonderfully powerful account it is.