ABSTRACT
English religious poetry begins with a sharpness unusual in the history of literature. An elderly illiterate farmhand of Yorkshire, Cædmon by name, who had never learned how to make verses and would flee for shame when, at entertainments, his turn came to sing, suddenly began to compose poems of a kind hitherto not known in English: religious narrative verse on themes drawn from Holy Writ. The story of Cædmon is told in Bede;1 it is so familiar that we need not tell it again here. Cædmon served as lay brother and, later, as monk in a monastery at Strenæshalc (Whitby?) under the abbess Hild; his literary activity thus falls between the years 657 and 680 (Hild’s term as abbess). Bede gives a Latin paraphrase of Cædmon’s first poem, the so-called Hymn, and texts of the poem in a dialect of the Northumbrian English native to the poet have come down to us in MSS of Bede’s work. The following translation into modern speech is based on the Moore MS text, printed in A.H.Smith’s edition:2
Now [we] shall praise the heaven-realm’s Keeper, God’s might and his mood-thought, the work of the glory-Father, as he of each wonder, the eternal Lord, the beginning ordained. He first made to the children of men heaven for roof, the holy Creator. Then the middle-yard mankind’s Keeper, the eternal Lord, afterwards created for men, the earth, the Ruler almighty.
