ABSTRACT
Cædmon was a farm-hand of Welsh descent working on the monastic estate of Streonaeshalch (Whitby) during the abbacy of Abbess Hild (657 – 79), who hosted the famous Synod or Council of Whitby in 664. Bede says that one night Cædmon had a dream, composed an English hymn on Creation without having heard the words before, recited this poem in the morning, had its moral soundness verifi ed, and then joined the community of monks. Two generations later, Bede paraphrased the sense in Latin prose, but scribes added in a marginal English text, whether one related to the Northumbrian original or one translated (back) into English from Bede’s Latin. The text is short, somewhat repetitive, and not fully meaningful unless some effort is made to understand the novelty of the form (Stanley 1995). English had not been used for poems of devotion before. Already in Bede’s time there were two versions, one with aeldu barnum ‘sons of men’ (as below) and the other with eordu barnum ‘sons of earth’. Yet the tradition valued this Hymn as the centuries passed. Though never embodied into the Latin text in manuscripts, it was suffi ciently iconic to be added to the side in most of them, right into the twelfth century.
