![]() and Kelly, F., Text and Translation, lines 2001–8 (p. ( Dublin, 1976) 1 Google Scholar: Greene, D. See The Irish Adam and Eve Story from Saltair na Rann, 2 vols. Google ScholarĢ5 In the Middle Irish Saltair na Rann, Cain dies when a ‘bent tree’ in the valley of Jehosaphat strikes against the lump in his forehead (one of the ‘marks’ of Cain) thereafter, the poet says, the valley was ‘without fruits or fertility’. ![]() Hall for drawing my attention to this passage. According to the Midrash Rabbah on Genesis IV.9, Abel's blood ‘could not ascend above, because the soul had not yet ascended thither nor could it go below, because no man had yet been buried there hence the blood lay spattered on the trees and the stones’ ( Midrash Rabbah, trans. Anglo-Saxon Textual Illumination ( Kalamazoo, MI, 1992), p. 49), where Abel's blood strikes a rock (for a facsimile, see Ohlgren, T. 253) that this legend is represented in the Junius Manuscript illustration (p. in his Late Antique, Early Christian and Mediaeval Art: Selected Papers ( New York, 1979), pp. CrossRef Google Scholar See also Schapiro, M., ‘ Cain's Jawbone that Did the First Murder’, The Art Bull. Google ScholarĢ4 The Prose Solomon and Saturn and Adrian and Ritheus, ed. Roques, M., Classiques français du moyen âge 86 ( Paris, 1958), lines 6983–90. Google Scholar Possibly related to this Tree-of-Life variant of the tradition is the great sycamore tree ‘planted in the time of Abel’ in the continuation of Chrétien de Troyes's Le chevalierde la charrette, ed. Giants and other monstrosities are engendered after people eat these fruit! Another medieval legend found in the Queste del Saint Graal and Malory's Morte Darthur (XVII.5–6) relates how ‘the offshoot from the tree of knowledge changed from white to green to red when Abel (a ‘type’ of Christ) was born and from green to red when he was slain’ (see Ladner, G., ‘Vegetation Symbolism and the Concept of Renaissance’, in De Artibus Opuscula XL: Essays in Honor of Envin Panofsky, ed. Google Scholar Rabelais travestied such pious folklore in his Pantagruel: ‘the earth soaked with that righteous blood became so prodigiously fertile in all the fruits the soil offers us (and especially the medlar apple) that everyone ever after has always called it the year of the giant medlar apples, because it took just three of them to make a bushel’ ( Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. See also the article ‘Abel’ in The Jewish Encyclopedia, 12 vols. For a stylistic feature which the poem shares with Anglo-Latin historiography, see Hill, ibid.Ģ3 The legends of the Jews, 6 vols. In lines 112–13, the poet's use of the term her to signal the beginning of world history is reminiscent of the stereotyped her convention of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: ‘Her ærest gesceop ece Drihten, / helm eallwihta, heofon and eorðan’. The poet's historiographic approach could have been modelled on the genre of the universal chronicle, which typically surveys biblical history beginning with Creation. ![]() D., ‘ The “Variegated Obit” as an Historiographic Motif in Old English Poetry and Anglo-Latin Historical Literature’, Traditio 44 ( 1988), 101–24, at 101 CrossRef Google Scholar, states similarly that ‘The Old English Genesis A is before all else a historical poem’. 53) Google Scholar concedes that ‘the specific approach of Genesis A is predominantly literal’. Doane, Even ( Genesis A: a New Edition ( Madison, WI, 1978), p. 8 Frank, Roberta, ‘ Some Uses of Paranomasia in Old English Scriptural Verse’, Speculum 47 ( 1972), 207–26 CrossRef Google Scholar, argues that the poet ‘highlighted potentially Christological episodes … with multiple plays on “word”, as if striving to make the Old English word more like the logos in which all meanings were enclosed’ but she also states that ‘There is no doubt that the main concern of the Genesis poet was to narrate the historical truth of Old Testament events’ (p.
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