The Anglo-Saxon Visionary Cross: A Prototype Student Edition, Senior Seminar, and Scholarly Electronic Edition

Project Overview

This project is designed to produce three distinct components: first, a working prototype of an interactive, electronic student edition of the Ruthwell and Brussels Crosses and the Dream of the Rood text in the Vercelli Book manuscript; second, a Senior Seminar structured around that student edition; third, a published, state-of-the-art scholarly version of the student edition prototype. The completed Anglo-Saxon Visionary Cross will combine interactive graphics and text, and will involve scholarly studies of the cross in all its various contexts: art historical, cultural, literary, textual, and will include an integration of text, image and commentary in a single package.

The Cult of the Cross reached a peak of popularity in Anglo-Saxon Britain in the seventh and eighth centuries, a phenomenon still visible today in the 1500 standing stone crosses extant in Britain.  Several of the most important of these combine Celtic, Christian, Pagan, and Germanic motifs and themes in a particularly vibrant cultural mix.  Most famously, the Ruthwell Cross (photo at right) in Dumfries in the south of Scotland combines zoomorphic Celtic vinescroll patterns with Christian biblical scenes and Germanic runes;  these runes recount a part of the text of “The Dream of the Rood,” one of the earliest English poems, which is itself a blend of pagan heroic sensibilities and Christian themes of redemption.  “The Dream of the Rood” survives only in the partial text recorded on the Ruthwell Cross, in a shorter fragment inscribed on the Brussels Cross (photo at left,) and in a complete version located in one of the handful of great Anglo-Saxon poetic manuscripts, The Vercelli Book, so called because of its (somewhat mysterious) presence in the cathedral library of Vercelli, Italy.  Photographic still images are of extremely limited utility in the study of these sorts of materials, and heretofore it has been impossible to study any one of these resources without considerable time and expense. The Anglo-Saxon Visionary Cross will bring into the classroom a collation of high-quality, interactive digital images of a whole series of related and relevant manuscript pages, illuminations, and material artifacts, complete with editorial notes, scholarly apparatus, and hypertext links to all the scholarship now available on each of these interrelated texts and objects.

Summer 2004 Pilot Project Component: The Ruthwell Cross

Standing nearly twenty feet high, the Ruthwell Cross, located inside the Kirk at Ruthwell (photo at right,) is a striking combination of Celtic artistic traditions (intricate patterns known as vinescroll), Biblical scenes, and Germanic runes and warrior conception of Christ, all bound together in an overtly Christian symbol. A number of other British crosses likewise blend Christian and Pagan cultural and mythic elements, perhaps most notably those at Bewcastle, Gosforth, Andreas, and Maughold.  Most notably, the runic inscription running along the east and west faces of the Ruthwell Cross includes a passage from “The Dream of the Rood” describing Christ’s mounting of the Rood, and his death thereon;  it has been noted that this passage is one which most emphasizes the Christ Militant of Anglo-Saxon belief.  It also has been argued that this particular selection resonates with the scene of the death of the Norse god Baldr.  The Ruthwell Cross, like the Nunburnholme Cross, was at one point dismantled and partially buried, and its modern reconstruction was imperfectly implemented;  a digital version, therefore, could allow the viewer to see the cross both as it is, and as it once might have been.  The lone manuscript known to contain “The Dream of the Rood” dates from the tenth century or so, but the Ruthwell Cross itself dates from the height of the Cult of the Cross in Britain—perhaps the early part of the second quarter of the eighth century—and therefore some early form of the poem must have, as well.

Current State of the Project and Tentative Time Table

The preliminary work for this project was begun in earnest in the Spring of 2003 with consultation with Martin K. Foys, editor of The Digital Edition of the Bayeux Tapestry and an expert in the field of the interactive electronic imaging of medieval artifacts; over the course of the ensuing year our technical team, led by James Rutkowski, began experimenting with various camera and tripod combinations. In the Spring of 2004 Rutkowski tested such a rig on the Irish Brigade monument on the Gettysburg Battlefield; this memorial is a standing cross not unlike the Ruthwell Cross in its dimensions, and Rutkowski developed a prototype of an interactive cross with the images he gathered. Note that this first prototype has shots at various angles from the same tripod position, and thus the overall view of the object is somewhat distorted, although the resolution of the images themselves, even at high magnification, is quite good.

Rutkowski (photo at left, deep in the Ruthwell "pit") and Christopher Fee completed the initial pilot on-site component in Ruthwell 7-11 June 2004. We hope to travel to Belgium in early June 2005 to capture digital images of the Brussels Cross. We spent the balance of Summer 2004 beginning to develop a digital model of the cross and to design its interactive format. We began with the East Face of the Ruthwell Cross; the image at the center of the prototype is only 1% of full size, and may be magnified to more than 100%; at 100% the image is high-resolution and quite sharp, but the viewer will notice a loss of this clarity as magnification exceeds life-size. Compared to the Irish Brigade prototype, one will note that the images of the Ruthwell Cross are not distorted by the panning of a tripod at different angles, as all these shots were taken face-on by using a twenty-foot camera rig aligned with the face of the Cross. Due to budgetary and space/weight constraints (the entire rig had to fit into one airline-friendly bag) our apparatus allowed for slight vibration; we compensated for this movement by taking multiple shots of each 6-8 inch segment of each face. Keeping the segment size small also allowed for a generous overlap during stitching, and thus we also smoothed out a lot of bumps through that process. Another obstacle was the irregular shape of the pit in which the Cross is mounted, which forced us to improvise shot distances. Moreover, it's obvious from a glance at the initial prototype that the irregular lighting in the Ruthwell Kirk provides its own challenges, and our current prototype cross is much darker at the base than it is at the top. Time constraints limited us further, and we only were able to take images of the four main faces of the Cross; although these four faces look very good and offer opportunities for fine close-up views of the object, we will need to return to take angled shots if we are to hope to develop a more realistic 3-D model of the Cross. These limitations notwithstanding, the successful completion of this pilot project assures us that, given more time and a more generous budget, we should be able to make a quantum leap in quality in the next iteration of the project.

On September 14th 2004, Fee and Rutkowski presented “Electronic Dreamin’ the Rood: Sandstone Crosses, Talking Objects, and Bringing the Anglo-Saxon World to Life in the Wired Classroom” at Gettysburg College under the auspices of The Christian A. Johnson Center for Creative Teaching. As part of this talk we introduced a working prototype of an interactive Ruthwell Cross. Fee and Rutkowski also have accepted an invitation to present a paper entitled “Digitally Imagining the Rood: Praxis and Pitfalls in the Development of a Prototype Electronic Ruthwell Cross” at the Fortieth International Congress on Medieval Studies in May 2005 at Western Michigan University. We then will spend the Summer of 2005 capturing the images for and developing the Brussels Cross component, digitizing the relevant folia of The Vercelli Book facsimile, collating these with images of the manuscript itself, and developing related interactive modules. We plan to participate in a demonstration and discussion of some aspects of our prototype at the conference of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists in August 2005 in Munich, Germany. Fee then will teach a senior seminar on the Visionary Anglo-Saxon Cross in the Fall of 2005, and will develop further multimedia components as a part of that course. Fee, Rutkowski, and the seminar students will present the fruits of this labor for the Center for Creative Teaching in the Spring of 2006.

Currently Fee and Rutkowski are part of a larger collaborative group (including colleagues from the US, Canada, the UK, and Italy) which plans to develop the more highly refined scholarly version of The Anglo-Saxon Visionary Cross over the course of the next few years. We are in the initial phases of applying for a number of large grants to fund the cost of the 4-5 year project, which may total between $250,000-400,000 (US.)

Click for a video clip of Fee and Rutkowski on-site at Ruthwell with our rudimentary (but highly portable!) test rig.

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All text, static images, interactive artifacts and video clips copyright 2004-2006 Christopher Fee, James Rutkowski and Gettysburg College