ISBN: | 978-5-5136-7907-3 |
High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Elene is an Old English poem, sometimes known as "Saint Helena Finds the True Cross." It is translated into Old English from a Latin text and is the longest of Cynewulf`s four signed poems. It is the fifth of six poems appearing in the Vercelli manuscript, which also contains The Fates of the Apostles, Andreas, Soul and Body I, Homiletic Fragment I, and Dream of the Rood. The poem is the first English account of the finding of the Holy Cross by Saint Helena, mother of Emperor Constantine. The poem was written by Cynewulf some time between 750 and the tenth century (Cameron 1987). It is written in a West Saxon dialect, but certain Anglianisms and metrical evidence concerning false rhymes suggest it was written in a non-Anglian dialect. It is 1,321 lines long.