Images of Christ: The Ruthwell Cross

Rowena Loverence continues her encounters with images of Christ

‘When fishes flew and forests walked/And figs grew upon thorn…’ I must have learned GK Chesterton’s poem ‘The Donkey’ when I was about ten. I loved its magical opening. I thought he wildly overstated the donkey’s odd appearance – did he never ride on one at the seaside? But I got the punchline: that one way into the Christian story is by trying to see it through the eyes of the ‘lesser’ characters in it – even the non-human ones. I soon learned that Chesterton was following in a tradition that goes back in Britain at least thirteen hundred years.

The Ruthwell Cross occupies a purpose-built apse in a church in Dumfries and dates from the period, circa AD 700, when the Angles occupied this part of Scotland. It stands an extraordinary seventeen feet in height, and although it was mutilated by enraged Calvinists in the seventeenth century the carvings that survive are in remarkable condition. This begs the question as to how much of its life could actually have been spent outdoors.

The thirteen figural scenes, with their Latin inscriptions, are remarkable enough, but the fame of the Ruthwell Cross lies in its runic inscriptions. Here it is as if the cross itself speaks in its own voice of the experience of the Crucifixion. ‘I beheld it all’, it says. ‘I held the king. I dared not bend. They mocked us together; I was wet with blood.’

These verses are two stanzas of an early Christian poem, ‘The Dream of the Rood’ (‘rood’ meaning ‘cross’). It is otherwise known only from a single manuscript, now in Italy, which dates from the tenth century. The Ruthwell Cross predates the manuscript by two or three hundred years. Despite the passage of time, the text in both is pretty much identical.

Anglo-Saxon culture in the late seventh and early eighth centuries was extraordinarily rich. This was the age of Bede and the Lindisfarne Gospels, of Whitby and Abbess Hild. Did Hild perhaps have a hand in the Ruthwell Cross, with its moving depiction, described in the accompanying Latin text, of the anonymous woman kneeling at Jesus’ feet, washing his feet with her tears and wiping them with her hair? But the Anglo-Saxon viewer would also have expected to see a victorious Christ, ‘the young warrior, when he mounted the cross in the sight of all men’.

One of those whom Christ needed to defeat was his predecessor, the Norse god Odin. The pagan Scandinavians told how Odin had hung, wounded, on the cosmic tree Yggdrasil for nine days and nights in order to learn the runes that gave order to life. The author of ‘The Dream of the Rood’ must have known this story.

The first recorded visitor to the Ruthwell Cross in modern times was William Nicolson, then archdeacon of Carlisle, who saw it in 1697. He was told another story – that when it was first erected the cross was not so tall but grew miraculously, like a tree, until it touched the roof of the church. He wrote wryly: ‘I wonder’d to see a Company of modern Presbyterians so steady in this Faith.’

We live today in an age when Christianity seems very old – worn-out, even. The Ruthwell Cross is a precious window into how our ancestors came to faith, by an exercise of sympathetic imagination. It may offer us the same route not to lose it.

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