16-) English Literature
.jpeg)
Cædmon
(/ˈkædmən, ˈkædmɒn/; fl. c. 657–684) is the earliest English poet whose name is
known. Caedmon is recognised as the
first English poet composing his Hymn in the 7th century at Whitby Abbey, as
told by Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English people . Caedmon was
one of the first people to compose poetry in the English language, making him
the founder of English literature as we know it today. In Caedmon's day,
English was spoken and performed, but Latin and Greek were the languages of
Christianity.A Northumbrian cowherd who cared for the animals at the double
monastery of Streonæshalch (now known as Whitby Abbey) during the abbacy of St.
Hilda, he was originally ignorant of "the art of song" but learned to
compose one night in the course of a dream, according to the 8th-century
historian Bede. He later became a zealous monk and an accomplished and
inspirational Christian poet.
Cædmon
is one of twelve Anglo-Saxon poets identified in mediaeval sources, and one of
three of these for whom both roughly contemporary biographical information and
examples of literary output have survived. His story is related in the Historia
ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum ("Ecclesiastical History of the English
People") by Bede who wrote, "[t]here was in the Monastery of this
Abbess a certain brother particularly remarkable for the Grace of God, who was
wont to make religious verses, so that whatever was interpreted to him out of
scripture, he soon after put the same into poetical expressions of much
sweetness and humility in Old English, which was his native language. By his
verse the minds of many were often excited to despise the world, and to aspire
to heaven."
Cædmon's
only known surviving work is Cædmon's Hymn, a nine-line alliterative vernacular
praise poem in honour of God. The poem is one of the early attested examples of
Old English and is, with the runic Ruthwell Cross and Franks Casket
inscriptions, one of three candidates for the earliest attested example of Old
English poetry. It is also one of the early recorded examples of sustained
poetry in a Germanic language. In 1898, Cædmon's Cross was erected in his
honour in the graveyard of St Mary's Church in Whitby.
Life
No detail of Cædmon’s family life is recorded but it
is believed that he was born in the year 600 and is perceived to be, at first,
a simple, uneducated man. His task at the monastery was to work and sleep with
the animals while other monks went about their holy orders by day and feasted,
sang and played harps before bedtime.
Bede's account
Much
of what is known about the 7th century poet known as Cædmon is thanks to the
Venerable Bede’s great work The Ecclesiastical History of the English People
(written in Latin as Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum). Bede was a monk
living in the north of England whose carefully documented accounts of life at
that time earned him the title “The Father of English History”. Cædmon is
certainly one of the earliest known English poets and it is said that the
ability to compose verse came to him in a dream one night while resting from
his labours at the Streonæshalch monastery contained within Whitby Abbey. His
inspiration drove him to become an inspirational poet, producing powerful
religious work such as his epic Genesis which ran to twenty one separate books.
One
evening, while the monks were feasting, singing, and playing a harp, Cædmon
left early to sleep with the animals because he knew no songs. The impression
clearly given by St. Bede is that he lacked the knowledge of how to compose the
lyrics to songs. While asleep, he had a dream in which "someone"
(quidam) approached him and asked him to sing principium creaturarum, "the
beginning of created things." After first refusing to sing, Cædmon
subsequently produced a short eulogistic poem praising God, the Creator of
heaven and earth.
Upon
awakening the next morning, Caedmon remembered everything he had sung and added
additional lines to his poem. He told his foreman about his dream and gift and
was taken immediately to see the abbess, believed to be St Hilda of Whitby. The
abbess and her counsellors asked Cædmon about his vision and, satisfied that it
was a gift from God, gave him a new commission, this time for a poem based on
"a passage of sacred history or doctrine", by way of a test.
When
Cædmon returned the next morning with the requested poem, he was invited to
take monastic vows. The abbess ordered her scholars to teach Cædmon sacred
history and doctrine, which after a night of thought, Bede records, Cædmon
would turn into the most beautiful verse. According to Bede, Cædmon was
responsible for a large number of splendid vernacular poetic texts on a variety
of Christian topics.
After
a long and zealously pious life, Cædmon died like a saint: receiving a
premonition of death, he asked to be moved to the abbey's hospice for the
terminally ill where, having gathered his friends around him, he died after receiving
the Holy Eucharist, just before nocturns. Although he is often listed as a
saint, this is not confirmed by Bede and it has been argued that such
assertions are incorrect.
The details of Bede's story, and in particular of the miraculous
nature of Cædmon's poetic inspiration, are not generally accepted by scholars
as being entirely accurate, but there seems no good reason to doubt the
existence of a poet named Cædmon. Bede's narrative has to be read in the
context of the Christian belief in miracles, and it shows at the very least
that Bede, an educated and intelligent man, believed Cædmon to be an important
figure in the history of English intellectual and religious life.
Dates
Bede
gives no specific dates in his story. Cædmon is said to have taken holy orders
at an advanced age and it is implied that he lived at Streonæshalch at least in
part during Hilda's abbacy (657–680). Book IV Chapter 25 of the Historia
ecclesiastica appears to suggest that Cædmon's death occurred at about the same
time as the fire at Coldingham Abbey, an event dated in the E text of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to 679, but after 681 by Bede.
The
reference to his temporibus "at this time" in the opening lines of
Chapter 25 may refer more generally to Cædmon's career as a poet. However, the
next datable event in the Historia ecclesiastica is King Ecgfrith's raid on
Ireland in 684 (Book IV, Chapter 26). Taken together, this evidence suggests an
active period beginning between 657 and 680 and ending between 679 and 684.
Modern discoveries
The
only biographical or historical information that modern scholarship has been
able to add to Bede's account concerns the Brittonic origins of the poet's
name. Although Bede specifically notes that English was Cædmon's
"own" language, the poet's name is of Celtic origin: from Proto-Welsh
*Cadṽan (from Brythonic *Catumandos). Several scholars have suggested that
Cædmon himself may have been bilingual on the basis of this etymology, Hilda's
close contact with Celtic political and religious hierarchies, and some (not
very close) analogues to the Hymn in Old Irish poetry. Other scholars have
noticed a possible onomastic allusion to 'Adam Kadmon' in the poet's name,
perhaps suggesting that the entire story is allegorical.
Other medieval sources
No
other independent accounts of Cædmon's life and work are known to exist. The
only other reference to Cædmon in English sources before the 12th century is
found in the 10th-century Old English translation of Bede's Latin Historia.
Otherwise, no mention of Cædmon is found in the corpus of surviving Old
English. The Old English translation of the Historia ecclesiastica does contain
several minor details not found in Bede's Latin original account.
Of
these, the most significant is that Cædmon felt "shame" for his inability
to sing vernacular songs before his vision, and the suggestion that Hilda's
scribes copied down his verse æt muðe "from his mouth". These
differences are in keeping with the Old English translator's practice in
reworking Bede's Latin original, however, and need not, as Wrenn argues,
suggest the existence of an independent English tradition of the Cædmon story.
Heliand
A
second, possibly pre-12th-century allusion to the Cædmon story is found in two
Latin texts associated with the Old Saxon Heliand poem. These texts, the
Praefatio (Preface) and Versus de Poeta (Lines about the poet), explain the
origins of an Old Saxon biblical translation (for which the Heliand is the only
known candidate) in language strongly reminiscent of, and indeed at times identical
to, Bede's account of Cædmon's career. According to the prose Praefatio, the
Old Saxon poem was composed by a renowned vernacular poet at the command of the
emperor Louis the Pious. The text then adds that this poet had known nothing of
vernacular composition until he was ordered to translate the precepts of sacred
law into vernacular song in a dream.
The
Versus de Poeta contain an expanded account of the dream itself, adding that
the poet had been a herdsman before his inspiration and that the inspiration
itself had come through the medium of a heavenly voice when he fell asleep
after pasturing his cattle. While our knowledge of these texts is based
entirely on a 16th-century edition by Flacius Illyricus,[20] both are usually
assumed on semantic and grammatical grounds to be of medieval composition This
apparent debt to the Cædmon story agrees with semantic evidence attested to by
Green demonstrating the influence of Old English biblical poetry and
terminology on early continental Germanic literatures.
Sources and analogues
In
contrast to his usual practice elsewhere in the Historia ecclesiastica, Bede
provides no information about his sources for the Cædmon story. Since a similar
paucity of sources is also characteristic of other stories from Whitby Abbey in
his work, this may indicate that his knowledge of Cædmon's life was based on
tradition current at his home monastery in (relatively) nearby
Wearmouth-Jarrow.
Perhaps
as a result of this lack of documentation, scholars have devoted considerable
attention since the 1830s to tracking down possible sources or analogues to
Bede's account. These parallels have been drawn from all around the world,
including biblical and classical literature, stories told by the aboriginal
peoples of Australia, North America and the Fiji Islands, mission-age accounts
of the conversion of the Xhosa in Southern Africa, the lives of English
romantic poets, and various elements of Hindu and Muslim scripture and
tradition.
Although
the search was begun by scholars such as Sir Francis Palgrave, who hoped either
to find Bede's source for the Cædmon story or to demonstrate that its details
were so commonplace as to hardly merit consideration as legitimate
historiography, subsequent research has instead ended up demonstrating the
uniqueness of Bede's version: as Lester shows, no "analogue" to the
Cædmon story found before 1974 mirrors Bede's chapter in more than about half
its main properties; the same observation can be extended to cover all
analogues since identified.
Seerah of Muhammad
The
strong affinities between Cædmon's vision and that of the Prophet Muhammad have
been widely remarked upon. While meditating in a cave, Muhammad was visited by
the angel Gabriel, who commanded him to read, just as Cædmon had a vision of an
otherworldly visitor as he slept in a cowshed. Muhammad was also illiterate,
like Cædmon. When the visitor asks them both to "sing" in Cædmon's
case and "read" in Muhammad's case, both refuse to, saying they
cannot. Then miraculously both recite divinely-inspired poetry, in Muhammad's
case the first verses of the Qur'an. In 1983, Klaus von See, the scholar of
Scandinavian and German literature, first put forward the theory that Bede's
story of Cædmon had a direct relationship with Ibn Ishaq's account of the
revelation of the Qur'an to Muhammad, though he was not the first to note the
remarkable parallels. Gregor Schoeler also provided a definitive account of the
evolution of the story of Muhammad's call to prophecy into Bede's narrative.
Work
General corpus
Perhaps
surprisingly, the earliest recorded poem in Old English has very humble origins
and is credited to a shy and retiring cowherd named Caedmon.
Bede's
account indicates that Cædmon was responsible for the composition of a large
oeuvre of vernacular religious poetry. In contrast to Saints Aldhelm and
Dunstan, Cædmon's poetry is said to have been exclusively religious. Bede
reports that Cædmon "could never compose any foolish or trivial poem, but
only those which were concerned with devotion", and his list of Cædmon's
output includes work on religious subjects only: accounts of creation,
translations from the Old and New Testaments, and songs about the "terrors
of future judgment, horrors of hell, ... joys of the heavenly kingdom, ... and
divine mercies and judgments."
Of
this corpus, only his first poem survives. While vernacular poems matching
Bede's description of several of Cædmon's later works are found in London,
British Library, Junius 11, traditionally referred to as the "Junius"
or "Cædmon" manuscript, the older traditional attribution of these
texts to Cædmon or Cædmon's influence cannot stand. The poems show significant
stylistic differences both internally and with Cædmon's original Hymn, and
there is nothing about their order or content to suggest that they could not
have been composed and anthologised without any influence from Bede's
discussion of Cædmon's oeuvre.
The
first three Junius poems are in their biblical order and, while Christ and
Satan could be understood as partially fitting Bede's description of Cædmon's
work on future judgment, pains of hell and joys of the heavenly kingdom, the
match is not exact enough to preclude independent composition. As Fritz and Day
have shown, Bede's list itself may owe less to direct knowledge of Cædmon's
actual output than to traditional ideas about the subjects fit for Christian
poetry or the order of the catechism. Similar influences may, of course, also
have affected the makeup of the Junius volume.
Cædmon's Hymn
The
countless translations and amendments to Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica over the
years mean that we cannot know the original words of Caedmon’s Hymn with any
certainty, particularly as many of the Old English versions would have been a
direct translation from Bede’s Latin – so in effect a translation of a
translation. Bede also offers no specific dates for the Hymn, save to say that
Caedmon lived at the Streonæshalch monastery during Hilda’s time as Abbess and
that Caedmon died around the time of a great fire at Coldingham Abbey, said to
have taken place between 679 – 681AD.
Although
originally composed to be sung aloud in praise of God, the form and structure
of Caedmon’s ‘Hymn’ is actually more akin to a poem than a hymn in the
tradition sense. The Hymn is also heavily alliterated and contains a pause mid
line, a style favoured by Old English poetry which was itself the result of the
oral traditions being designed to be read, rather than spoken or sung.
The
fanciful nature of Caedmon’s inspiration for the Hymn has led many historians
to doubt the authenticity of Bede’s story. The traditional Anglo-Saxon poetry
reserved for the worship of monarchs has also been adapted from the original
‘rices weard’ (keeper of the kingdom) to ‘heofonrices weard’ (keeper of the
kingdom of heaven) in Caedmon’s Hymn, suggesting a less divine inspiration.
However, whilst it is unlikely that Caedmon’s Hymn was the very first poem to
be composed in Old English, it certainly takes its place in history as the
earliest surviving poetry of its kind, quite apart from its supposedly
miraculous inception.
Caedmon’s
Hymn in Old English and its modern translation (excerpt from The Earliest
English Poems, Third Edition, Penguin Books, 1991):
The
only known survivor from Cædmon's oeuvre is his Hymn (audio version). The poem
is known from 21 manuscript copies, making it the best-attested Old English
poem after Bede's Death Song (with 35 witnesses) and the best attested in the
poetic corpus in manuscripts copied or owned in the British Isles during the
Anglo-Saxon period. The Hymn also has by far the most complicated known textual
history of any surviving Old English poem.
It
is found in two dialects and five distinct recensions (Northumbrian aelda,
Northumbrian eordu, West-Saxon eorðan, West-Saxon ylda, and West-Saxon eorðe),
all but one of which are known from three or more witnesses. It is one of the
early attested examples of written Old English and one of the early recorded
examples of sustained poetry in a Germanic language. Together with the runic
Ruthwell Cross and Franks Casket inscriptions, Cædmon's Hymn is one of three
candidates for the early attested example of Old English poetry.
There
is continuing critical debate about the status of the poem as it is now
available to us. While some scholars accept the texts of the Hymn as more or
less accurate transmissions of Cædmon's original, others argue that they
originated as a back-translation from Bede's Latin, and that there is no
surviving witness to the original text.
Manuscript evidence
All
copies of Hymn are found in manuscripts of the Historia ecclesiastica or its
translation, where they serve as either a gloss to Bede's Latin translation of
the Old English poem, or, in the case of the Old English version, a replacement
for Bede's translation in the main text of the History. Despite this close
connection with Bede's work, the Hymn does not appear to have been transmitted
with the Historia ecclesiastica regularly until relatively late in its textual
history. Scribes other than those responsible for the main text often copy the
vernacular text of the Hymn in manuscripts of the Latin Historia. In three
cases, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud Misc. 243, Oxford, Bodleian Library,
Hatton 43, and Winchester, Cathedral I, the poem is copied by scribes working a
quarter-century or more after the main text was first set down.
Even
when the poem is in the same hand as the manuscript's main text, there is
little evidence to suggest that it was copied from the same exemplar as the
Latin Historia: nearly identical versions of the Old English poem are found in
manuscripts belonging to different recensions of the Latin text; closely
related copies of the Latin Historia sometimes contain very different versions
of the Old English poem. With the exception of the Old English translation, no
single recension of the Historia ecclesiastica is characterised by the presence
of a particular recension of the vernacular poem.
Earliest text
Although
Caedmon has been referred to many times in medieval literature, it is the
‘Father of English History’, the Venerable Bede (672 – 26 May 735 AD) who first
refers to Cademon in his seminal work of 731AD, Historia ecclesiastica gentis
Anglorum (The Ecclesiastical History of the English People). According to Bede,
Caedmon tended to the animals which belonged to the Northumbrian monastery of
Streonæshalch (later to become Whitby Abbey) during St Hilda’s time as Abbess
between 657– 680AD.
As
legend would have it, Caedmon was unable to sing and knew no poetry, quietly
departing the mead hall whenever the harp was passed around so that he would
not embarrass himself in front of his more literate peers. On one such evening
as he fell asleep amongst the animals in his care, Caedmon is said to have
dreamt that an apparition appeared before him telling him to sing of the
principium creaturarum , or ‘the beginning of created things’. Miraculously,
Caedmon suddenly began to sing and the memory of the dream stayed with him,
allowing him to recall the holy verses for his master, Hilda and members of her
inner circle.
The
story, according to Bede, is that Cædmon dreamt one night that he could sing
and compose verse. In the dream an unknown person asked him to sing a song
about “the beginning of all created things”. This must have been quite a vivid
dream because he was inspired to write the eulogistic poem which is known as
Cædmon’s Hymn. It was a poem praising God and acknowledging that He created all
of heaven and earth. It was written in Latin but here is a translation of at
least some of it:
poem
So,
overnight Cædmon was transformed into both a poet and a singer and, on
reporting this great event, he was taken before the abbess and she listened to
his story intently. The sincerity that she saw within him convinced her that he
should immediately take holy orders as he had truly been given “a gift from
God”. The scholastic monks at the monastery set about teaching him about sacred
history and doctrine. From then on Cædmon became known as a great poet, capable
of producing the most beautiful and pious verse. He was responsible for a
considerable number of poems, covering a wide range of Christian topics,
written in the vernacular style so that many people could read them.
Cædmon
took holy orders at a fairly late stage in his life (possibly in his 50s) and
his poetry placed him in an exclusive group of only twelve known Anglo-Saxon
poets. From humble beginnings he certainly rose in stature at the monastery and
Bede described him as:
poem
Scholars
that came along in the following centuries might have been sceptical about this
story of the miraculous conversion of a simple shepherd into a great and
learned poet but Bede’s account certainly rings true in many quarters. He
believed that Cædmon deserves his place amongst the great names of English
religious figures and intellectuals.
Cædmon’s
life ended sometime around the year 670 which meant that he was 70 years old
when he died. It was recorded that he had a premonition of his own death.
The
theme in the hymn, or song of praise, is that God created the heavens and the
earth for the enjoyment of men. Caedmon praises God for His creation. Using
repetition, he points out twice that God, unlike man, is eternal. In a fairly
pagan Celtic atmosphere, we see some of the earliest influences of
Christianity.
The
poet used several interesting literary devices in 'Cædmon's Hymn. ' These
include alliteration, caesura, and allusion. Throughout the lines, the speaker
praises God without going into any detail about stories in the Bible or how his
own life was affected when he became devoutly Christian.
Caedmon's
Hymn is an alliterative praise poem (and hymn). It depends on rhythmic uses of
alliteration, or repetition of the same consonant throughout each line. It
represents the use of pagan Germanic poetic conventions in Christian cultures.
Kennings
are used in poetry to create different effects. Some examples from the
“Caedmon's Hymn” would be: “mankind's guardian” which is saying that God is the
protector of humans, “Glory-Father” where God is described as the father of
glory, and “Middle-earth” which explains the place between earth and hell.
In
general, we could think of hymns as those songs of praise and worship we send
up to God identifying for all to hear His attributes and thanking Him for His
amazing intervention in our world and in our lives.
The
moral of a story is the lesson that story teaches about how to behave in the
world. Moral comes from the Latin word mores, for habits. The moral of a story
is supposed to teach you how to be a better person.
Caedmon,
(flourished 658–680), first Old English Christian poet, whose fragmentary hymn
to the creation remains a symbol of the adaptation of the aristocratic-heroic
Anglo-Saxon verse tradition to the expression of Christian themes.
Caedmon
describes God in another metaphor as a kind of architect, a
"Measurer" whose power is exercised through something called
"mind-plans." These might just be "thoughts," but the
addition of "plans" in this kenning makes them seem more
architectural, like God is doodling with a compass in his head, figuring out
the circumference of the world, the depths of the oceanic basins, the height of
the sky—you know, the easy stuff.
There
sure are a lot of M's here. What's the effect of putting three M-sounds in a
single line? For Anglo-Saxon poets, alliteration was a way of organizing the line
around its four stresses and that big space in the middle. For more on how
alliteration became a calling card for all major Anglo-Saxon poetry, see
"Form and Meter." And look out for more alliterating words below!
When
Caedmon was able to produce more religious poetry it was decided that the gift
was a blessing from God. He went on to take his vows and become a monk,
learning his scriptures and the history of Christianity from Hilda’s scholars
and producing beautiful poetry as he did so.
Caedmon
remained a devout follower of the Church for the rest of his life and although
never formally recognised as a saint, Bede notes that Caedmon was granted a
premonition of his death following a short illness – an honour usually reserved
for the most holy of God’s followers – allowing him to receive the Eucharist
one last time and to arrange for his friends to be with him.
Unfortunately
all that remains of Caedmon’s poetry today is the nine line poem known as
Cædmon’s Hymn, which Bede includes in his Historia ecclesiastica and is said to
be the poem that Caedmon first sang in his dream. Interestingly, Bede chose not
to include the Old English version of Cædmon’s Hymn in his original version of
the Historia ecclesiastica, but instead the Hymn was written in Latin, presumably
to appeal to a world-wide audience who would be unfamiliar with the Anglo-Saxon
language. The Hymn appears in Old English in subsequent versions of the
Historia ecclesiastica which were translated by the Anglo-Saxons from the eight
century onwards.
The
oldest known version of the poem is the Northumbrian aelda recension. The
surviving witnesses to this text, Cambridge, University Library, Kk. 5. 16 (M)
and St. Petersburg, National Library of Russia, lat. Q. v. I. 18 (P), date to
at least the mid-8th century. M in particular is traditionally ascribed to
Bede's own monastery and lifetime, though there is little evidence to suggest
it was copied much before the mid-8th century.
The
following text, first column on the left below, has been transcribed from M
(mid-8th century; Northumbria). The text has been normalised to show a
line-break between each line and modern word-division. A transcription of the
likely pronunciation of the text in the early 8th-century Northumbrian dialect
in which the text is written is included, along with a modern English
translation.
Now [we] must honour the guardian of heaven,
the might of the architect, and his purpose,
the work of the father of glory — as he the beginning
of wonders
established, the eternal lord,
He first created for the children of men
heaven as a roof, the holy creator
Then the middle earth, the guardian of mankind
the eternal lord, afterwards appointed
the lands for men, the Lord almighty.
Bede's Latin version runs as follows:
"Now
we must praise the author of the heavenly realm, the might of the creator, and
his purpose, the work of the father of glory: as he, who, the almighty guardian
of the human race, is the eternal God, is the author of all miracles; who first
created the heavens as highest roof for the children men, then the earth."
Praise now to the keeper of the kingdom of heaven,
the power of the Creator, the profound mind
of the glorious Father, who fashioned the beginning
of every wonder, the eternal Lord.
For the children of men he made first
heaven as a roof, the holy Creator.
Then the Lord of mankind, the everlasting Shepherd,
ordained in the midst as a dwelling place,
Almighty Lord, the earth for men.
ABSTRACT
Caedmon‟s
hymn is an Old English poem written by a Northumbrian shepherd who had likely
received the inspiration from the Christian God. It is considered as vernacular
poetry, it was initially written in the Northumbrian dialect and, later on,
transmitted into other translated versions. This brief paper is a literary
analysis of the Leningrad version of thehymn with the aim to highlight
stylistic features, use of language, themes, and value of the composition with
reference to the contributions of several experts of the poem.
INTRODUCTION
Caedmon‟s
hymn is the first poetic composition to be known of Old English literature. An
account of this hymn is given by the Venerable Bede, a monk, in his
Ecclesiastical History of the English People
in which he refers of a herdsman called Caedmon who lived in
Streonæshalch, (the older name for Whitby) in a period of time between 600-670
CE. According to Bede, Caedmon was an illiterate and a shy person who avoided
to sing in public during feasts at the Hall, but one night something uncommon
and extraordinary happened to him: he had a dream and, thereafter, could sing
about the creation of heaven and earth thanks to a divine inspiration. At first
those who knew him were skeptical about the verses he pronounced and,
therefore, he was conducted to the abbess of the monastery of Whitby, Hilda,
who after examining the situation and consulting some scholars, judged that the
event was a miracle and that Caedmon had certainly been inspired by their
Christian God. The hymn is an example of vernacular poetry, a literary work
that used common spoken language. It was written first in Northumbrian and then
translated in Latin by Bede in his Historia Eccelesiastica. There are different
living translations of the poem which were made at the time of the Anglo-Saxons
and in the following centuries, but all these renderings generated perplexities
about how the original text was really produced.
An Italian scholar, Roberta Bassi, affirms that
Bede‟s version of the poem was a translation of the meaning of the composition
rather than a literal work on the original text and highlights the existence of
several translations in Old
English of the manuscript, thus creating confusion
about the originality of the hymn. [1] In her analysis, she also mentions
Daniel Paul O‟Donnell‟s, an expert of the hymn who, in his book on Caedmon‟s
hymn, suggests the existence of eight translations of the poem.
DISCUSSION: ANALYSIS OF THE HYMN
The
version of the hymn analyzed in this paper is the Leningrad manuscript in
Modern English:
Now
let us praise the Guardian of the Kingdom of Heaven
the
might of the Creator and the thought of his mind,
the
work of the glorious Father, how He, the eternal Lord
established
the beginning of every wonder.
For
the sons of men, He, the Holy Creator
first
made heaven as a roof, then the
Keeper
of mankind, the eternal Lord
God
Almighty afterwards made the middle world
the
earth, for men.
The
stylistic features of the above text can be analyzed with respect to language,
structure, alliteration, rhyme, stresses, genre, similes and variation. This
version of the poem is written in Modern English, it is made of nine lines,
there
are no line-breaks, no rhymes, no alliteration, no relevant stresses
differently from what we can detect in the Old English text. The language used
is simple, the structure of the sentences follows the sequence
„subject-verb-object‟, there are commas in the text evidently used to create
pauses, it contains religious terms and words of reverence and praise to God.
The structure of the hymn resembles that of a psalm, a religious composition of
the Book of Psalms that, in turn, | P a g e – 12 belongs to the Christian Old
Testament. The term psalm derives from the Greek word ψαλμοί psalmoi which
means „instrumental music‟ and „words accompanying the music‟[2].
In
poetry the genre is the way to classify a poem according to its style or
subject matter. There are elegies, epic poems as well as dramatic and narrative
poetry. Caedmon‟s hymn is a short poem composed in honour to God and talks
about the existence of a common Father who created heaven and earth for
mankind. It represents an exhortation to live a Christian life and can, then,
be considered as a religious composition.Variation is a technique used in
poetry to reformulate in different words and with more emphasis the same
concept.Its function is that of embellishing and highlighting important parts
of the text. This technique is also defined by Niles et al. as “a double or
multiple statement of the same basic concept in different words”. The use of
variation is very frequent and redundant in Caedmon‟s hymn and it reflects a
typical feature of Old Germanic poetry and, therefore, reproduces the
aesthetics of an oral poetic performance as suggested by Francis Magoun in his
article “Bede’s Story of Caedmon: The
Case
of an Anglo-Saxon Oral Singer”. Examples of variation in the text are the eight
appellations that the author gives to God who is described as “the Guardian”,
“the Creator”, “the Glorious Father”, “the eternal Lord” (repeated twice), “the
Holy Creator”, “the Keeper of mankind” and “God Almighty”. A simile is a
comparison between two things by means of a connecting word such as like, as
and so and usuallycreates the personification of an inanimate object. In his
hymn, Caedmon makes an analogy between heaven and roof when he writes that
“…He...first made heaven as a roof”. The use of a simile here is symbolical and
it then elicits human‟s imagination and creates a feeling of safety and warmth.
God is above our heads and gives shelter and repair to us but we can detect
here also an implicit comparison to the mead-hall, a place where warriors and
thanes of the AngloSaxons used to gather together especially at night, thus
representing a welcome, warm and safe environment .Caedmon’s hymn is an example
of a composition made first orally which means that the author was able to make
verses using the official poetic metre and, in this case, thanks to God’s
intervention, the composer could use formulas. In poetry a formula is a
specific rhyming scheme or use of several syllables in each line while the process
of transferring the spoken language to a written form is called „oral-formulaic
composition‟. With reference to this process, two scholars, Milman Parry and
Albert Lord, affirmed that some features of Old English texts, like Caedmon‟s
poem, resemble the Ancient Greek epics such as the Iliad and Odyssey but how
Anglo-Saxon poetry was passed down through an oral tradition remains a subject
of debate. In Parry's view, formulas were not the exceptional production of
talented artists rather the traditional verses of singers that could be
remembered and improvised very easily.Caedmon is the first vernacular poet we
know by name and his hymn has references to God by using words and terms of the
heroic poetry. Caedmon‟s ability to make the hymn and other poems that are
included in the Historia Ecclesiastica, was a miracle and his writing skills
were undoubtedly inspired by God with the final aim to change people‟s mind.
The hymn differs from the usual theme of epic poems regarding battles, glorious
deeds and victories over the evils of the period of the Anglo-Saxons and it
also diverges from the elegiac compositions depicting conditions of loneliness,
despair and deep sorrow. Here we are dealing with a „dream song‟, a composition
made with the help of adivine gift, to incite people to praise and worship the
Christian God. In a time when Pope Gregory sent disciples and monks to England
to convert people to Christianity and to fight pagan values and old ideologies,
the hymn takes on a specific purpose: the Conversion of pagans. Its divine
inspiration is made stronger by the fact that Caedmon was never able to compose
any verse of song that did not deal with religion or that could have a vain and
frivolous content.
CONCLUSION
To
conclude, Caedmon‟s hymn is an example of a fusion of pagan and Christian
themes with the scope to spread
Christianity
in a pagan society, as stated by Tiarna O‟ Sullivan. In the poem, the
connection between epic poems and religious compositions lies in the fact that
God is considered as an „hero‟ and, hence, is comparable to the heroic figures
of the Anglo-Saxon period. Beowulf is a widely acknowledged hero of this
historical epoch and is described as “the mightiest man on earth” in analogy to
the “God Almighty” in Caedmon’s composition. Beowulf and God are, then, both
heroes and important characters of Old English literature and may have
different roles and antithetical values but are both described as omnipotent.
To reinforce O‟ Sullivan‟s comments is the statement made by another scholar,
who affirms that the hymn shares aspects of both Latin and Germanic traditions
and that elements of Latin literary and liturgical
influence
are evident in the text. A last reflection on Caedmon‟s hymn is the influence
his work had on the literature of the following times, especially on the
literary production of the last centuries. The concept of “middle world”, in
fact,appears in J.R.R. Tolkien‟s epic story „The Lord of The Rings‟ as a
tangible sign of the impact of the hymn on the culture and imagery of our time.
.jpeg)
