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sometimes branches) by Moses and/or David, and how they were used up
until the time of Christ, often including a story of Solomon, who attempts
to use the wood to build his temple, albeit unsuccessfully. Lastly, the story
tells of how the wood of the tree(s) was used to make the cross on which
Christ was crucified.14
The Roots of the Quest
This seemingly short story has a rather long history, one that is worth-
while reviewing in order to appreciate the complexity that has led to
its appearance in Old Icelandic manuscripts. Tracing the precursors of
the Quest, however, leads us through a tangled web of transmission.
From the medieval period, stories of the protoplasts’ post-Eden exile
and their children’s adventures are found in several vernaculars as
well as in Latin. The Quest had a former life, considerably antedating
Christianity, before it was integrated into the medieval True Cross
material (see figure 1).15 Legends of Seth are found in Talmudic and
Midrashic lore that can be traced back to Egypt because there was a
Jewish sect in Egypt around the first to fourth centuries CE, the Sethians,
whose Seth was an amalgamation of the biblical Seth and the Egyptian
god Seth (Set).16 The Sethians authored several Gnostic texts and might
have been responsible for the earliest forms of the Quest.17 The Sethians
believed that Seth was the Christ; it follows that Christians would have
wanted to amalgamate the story of the Quest into the orthodox Christian
belief structure via the additions of the three glimpses into Paradise,
culminating with the vision of Christ in the tree, who would be the savior.
14 For a more detailed summary of this material, see Mariane Overgaard (ed.), The History of
the Cross Tree, XXXX.
15 Quinn, Quest, 8.
16 Barbara Baert, Heritage of the Holy Wood: The Legend of the True Cross in Text and Image,
trans. Lee Preedy (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 315; Christian Onasch, “Der ägyptische und der
biblische Seth,” Archiv für Papyrusforschung 27 (1980): 99–119; Barbara Baert offers an
extensive discussion on the Gnostic roots of Seth as a character in, “Revisiting Seth in the
Legend of the Wood of the Cross: Interdisciplinary Perspectives between Text and Image,”
The Embroidered Bible: Studies in Biblical Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha in Honour of Michael
E. Stone, Studia in Veteris Testamenti Pseudepigrapha 26 (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 144.
17 Quinn, Quest, 29; A. F. J. Klijn, Seth in Jewish, Christian and Gnostic Literature (Leiden:
Brill, 1977), 6.
THE “QUEST OF SETH”