ABSTRACT
One of the earliest literary products on English soil is Bede’s great and important commentary on the Song of Songs. The Song of Songs is a collection of individual lyric love poems which is not to be understood as genuine folk poetry written by Solomon—as J. G. Herder believed—but as an artistic poetical work with a very deliberate and very subtle structure. The Song of Songs is made up of numerous dialogues, and it is one of the characteristics of the work that the persons speaking are not introduced, but that each speaker has to be deduced from the context. Indeed in the course of a single poem the author loves to ‘oscillate between different speakers’. The mutual caresses of the lovers in the Song of Songs inspired the theme of love-play between God and the soul, which is so important in medieval mysticism.
