Cædmon, OSB (; fl. c. 657–684) was a Benedictine monk and the earliest English poet whose name is known.Henry Bradley (1886). "Cædmon". In Lee, Sidney (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography. 8. London: Smith, Elder & Co. pp. 195-201. He was a Northumbrian cowherd who cared for the animals at the double monastery of Streonæshalch (now known as Whitby Abbey) during the abbacy of 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 Christian historian Bede. He is venerated as a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church, Catholic Church and Anglicanism, with a feast day on 11 February.
Cædmon is one of twelve Anglo-Saxon poets identified in medieval sources, and one of three of these for whom both roughly contemporary biographical information and examples of literary output have survived.The twelve named Anglo-Saxon poets are Æduwen, Aldhelm, Alfred the Great, Anlaf, Baldulf, Bede, Cædmon, Cnut, Cynewulf, Dunstan, Hereward and Wulfstan (or perhaps Wulfsige). Most of these are considered by modern scholars to be spurious—see O'Donnell 2005, Introduction 1.22. The three for whom biographical information and documented texts survive are Alfred, Bede, and Cædmon. Cædmon is the only Anglo-Saxon poet known primarily for his ability to compose vernacular verse, and no vernacular verse survives that is known to have been written by either Bede or Alfred. There are a number of verse texts known to have been composed by Cynewulf, but we know nothing of his biography. (No study appears to exist of the "named" Anglo-Saxon poets—the list here has been compiled from Frank 1993, Opland 1980, Sisam 1953 and Robinson 1990.) 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
Bede's account The sole source of original information about Cædmon's life and work is Bede's Historia ecclesiastica.Book IV, Chapter 24. The most recent edition is Colgrave and Mynors 1969 According to Bede, Cædmon was a lay brother who cared for the animals at the monastery Streonæshalch (now known as Whitby Abbey). 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 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 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.Stanley 1998
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.O'Donnell 2005
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.See Ireland 1986, pp. 228; Dumville 1981, p. 148
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).Jackson 1953, p. 554 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.See in particular Ireland 1986, p. 238 and Schwab 1972, p. 48 Other scholars have noticed a possible onomastic allusion to 'Adam Kadmon' in the poet's name, perhaps suggesting that the entire story is allegorical.See in particular O'Hare 1992, pp. 350–351
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.See Opland 1980, pp. 111–120
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 "from his mouth". These differences are in keeping with the Old English translator's practice in reworking Bede's Latin original,See Whitelock 1963 for a general discussion. however, and need not, as Wrenn argues, suggest the existence of an independent English tradition of the Cædmon story.Wrenn 1946, p. 281.
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)Andersson 1974, p. 278. in language strongly reminiscent of, and indeed at times identical to, Bede's account of Cædmon's career.Convenient accounts of the relevant portions of the Praefatio and Versus can be found in Smith 1978, pp. 13–14, and Plummer 1896 II pp. 255–258. 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.See Andersson 1974 for a review of the evidence for and against the authenticity of the prefaces.See Green 1965, particularly pp. 286–294.
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,Catalogus testium veritatis 1562. 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.Good reviews of analogue research can be found in Pound 1929, Lester 1974, and O'Donnell 2005.
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,Palgrave 1832 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;Lester 1974, p. 228. the same observation can be extended to cover all analogues since identified.O'Donnell 2005.
Work
General corpus