1 him] Some early critics found him troublesome in context with the rest of the line owing to its usual translation as a masculine pronoun, although in this case the subject is feminine plural. To explain the pronoun's case in the text, Cramer (1897), p. 159, proposes the word hī, while Cosijn (1898), p. 127, suggests hīe. ASPR III, p. 356, suggests that him may very well have been the poet's intended word. Because him may simply refer to ‘themselves’, that is the ‘women’ at the beginning of the poem, consequently I have retained him as it makes sense in this context. See Cosijn (1898).

on ūhtan] According to Conner (1980), p. 183, based on the terms on ūhtan and on dægrēd (line 9) there is a distinction in time between when the women began their journey and when the host of angels surrounded Christ's tomb. The difference between ūhtan and dægrēd was that ūhtan occupied the time of morning just before the sun was visible, whereas dægrēd was the time of dawn when the light was evident. Izydorczyk (1990, 439–47) discusses the temporal sequence of the Descent and the Resurrection in both the biblical and patristic tradition, and further addresses the implicit inversion of the events within the poem as demonstrated in lines 1, 9 and 17 of on ūhtan, dægrēd and on ūhtan.