Through the Eye of the Skull: peculiar first-person perspectives

Literature as diverse as Old English, medieval Welsh and Irish poetry and the tales of Scottish Travellers use the first-person to give a voice, and personality, to a diverse range of non-human beings and even artefacts. Using this device for the metaphysical relocation of self, the author’s identity may become conflated with a deity. Which is perhaps how it all started…
For a much longer version of this script see Through the Eye of the Skull: The metaphysical relocation of self in ritual narratives www.hoap.co.uk/through_the_eye.pdf
Acknowledgements
My greatest debt is to Sara Reith as without her thought-provoking account of Stanley Robertson I would never have begun to put together this chain of ideas.
My thanks to Alby Stone for answering queries about etymology and other arcane matters and to Anthony Weir for permission to use his reading of The Old Woman of Beare. See www.beyond-the-pale.co.uk/lament.htm
Thanks also to a once-homesick Robert Zimmerman for assistance holding props.
Translations of The Dream of the Rood:-
Mary Rambaran-Olm www.dreamofrood.co.uk
Elaine Treharne www.apocalyptic-theories.com/literature/dor/medora1.html)
Treharne brings out meanings in the original Old English that contrast with Rambaran-Olm’s more ‘functional’ version.
Sources
Clouter, Gregory A., 2003, The Lost Zodiac of the Druids, Vega.
Graham, Lloyd, 2010, ‘Echoes of antiquity in the early Irish “Song of Amergin”'; online at www.authorsden.com/categories/article_top.asp?catid=54&id=53506
Hartnett, Michael, 1969, The Hag of Beare, New Writers Press.
Higley, Sarah L., 2003, 'The wanton hand: reading and reaching into grammars and bodies in Old English riddle 12', in B.C. Withers and J. Wilcox (eds), Naked Before God: Uncovering the body in Anglo-Saxon England, West Virginia UP.
Raw, Barbara, 1978, The Art and Background of Old English Poetry, Edward Arnold.
Reith, Sara, 2008, ‘Through the "eye of the skull": memory and tradition in a Travelling landscape’, Cultural Analysis, Vol. 7.
Robertson, Stanley, 2009, Reek Roon a Camp Fire, Birlinn.
Semple, Sarah, 1998, ‘A fear of the past: the place of prehistoric burial mounds in the ideology of middle and later Anglo-Saxon England’, World Archaeology, 30:1 (The Past in the Past: the reuse of ancient monuments), 109-126.