h The Dream of the Rood was introduced was one that, like the whole of Europe, was in transition. To this end, he cites evidence that "there were two kinds of societies simultaneously in pre Conquest England: one centering around the great monasteries; and the other a military society depending on the comitatus [early Germanic feudal] relationship" (Diamond 7).
More specifically, Wolf sees the environment of The Dream of the Rood as a manifestation of Germanic feudal tradition, particularly in the language that describes the Rood as "the thane of Christ. . . . Like a good thane, the cross would defend the prince but it must again restrain itself because of the master's word" (Wolf 203). Schlauch connects The Dream of the Rood with Germanic literary influence to the degree Old English culture, like Germanic culture, derived from a common literary ancestor, which was not so much textual as traditional: Latin rhetoric. She cites the probably wide availability in England, as on the continent, of Ovidian poetry, which personified inanimate objectives and gave them speech by means of the device of prosopopoeia (Schlauch passim). Raw, who is mainly concerned to show a nexus of early Middle Eastern Christian art and the imagery of The Dream of the Rood, also sees a connection between Germanic poetry and art, and she notes a specific stylistic connection between the Carolingian (i.e., Germanic) culture on the continent, of which Cynewulf's poetry is typical, and the content of The Dream of the Rood (Raw 239).
Religious as well as secular culture has been charted as an important aspect of The Dream of the Rood. The life and passion of Christ provided the impulse for a a whole range of Old English verse. Hill's discussion of Christ III includes the statement that the image of sinners beholding "the wounds of Christ at the last Judgement is of course a commonplace of the medieval eschatological tradition" (Hill 235). To put it anoth...