Critical Introduction

The fragmentary Old English Life of Saint Christopher is bound with four other texts (Beowulf, Judith, the Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, and the Wonders of the East) in the late tenth/ early eleventh century compilation often called the Beowulf Manuscript, or the Nowell Codex, part of the British Library's Cotton Vitellius A.xv. In this text, the saint is called “worst beast” and is described as being twelve cubits tall, clearly suggesting a perception of excess and otherness in his body. Other Anglo-Saxon texts, such as that drawn from An Old English Martyrology, detail a perhaps more spectacular feature. The Saint Christopher known to the Anglo-Saxons was not only a giant but also a cynocephalus; that is, in addition to being unnaturally tall, he also had the head of a dog. The three saint's lives reproduced here thus provide readers with the opportunity to consider, in the figure of Christopher, the coincidence of two kinds of extraordinary bodies: the body of the saint and the body of the monster. At the same time, the texts also guide their readers to consider their own embodiment and its relationship to both textuality and salvation, as these narratives’ conclusions emphasize the saint's power to heal the wounded body. They encourage the reader to respond to them with an outpouring of tears from his or her own body.

Reading Questions

Perhaps the first question the life of a saint who has the head of a dog might raise is about how the dog's head makes the saint different from other saints. Is the difference a difference in kind, or does the coincidence of the saint's body and the monstrous body suggest an exaggeration but an underlying similarity?

A second question involves the function of the saint's body and the monstrous body. Both kinds of extraordinary bodies signify: they point to a meaning and power located elsewhere. But both are powerful because they are also available—and wondrous—in themselves. Christopher's prayers in fact emphasize that many miracles of healing will involve contact with any part of his body or any trace of his bodily suffering. How does this Life then ask its readers to conceptualize how signifying language might work? Finally, then, how does the Life reflect or create a kind of reader, in the “reader with tears” who might approach texts in a new way?