Cædmon

“ Cædmon was at first a servant in this monastery, but when the [Pg 31] power to sing came to him it lifted not only Cædmon himself to something better than he had been; it has also lifted men and women ever since to better ways of thinking and feeling and to greater happiness than they would ever have had without English poetry. ”

“ Limiting ourselves to our own country, and passing over the ancient bards, such as Taliesin and Merlin, whose verses were in praise of living and dead pagan heroes, and coming to the poets of the new religion, we see that the first of them Cædmon, a convert who became inmate of a monastery, rendered in metrical form the story of creation and sundry other sacred stories—a variously elaborated eulogy of the deity. ”

“ Abbess and brethren alike concluded 'that heavenly grace had been conferred on him by the Lord.' They translated for Cædmon a passage in Holy Writ, 'bidding him, if he could, put the same into verse.' The next morning he gave it them composed in excellent verse, whereon the abbess, understanding the divine grace in the man, bade him quit the secular habit and take on him the monastic life." Piece by piece the sacred story was thus thrown into Cædmon's poem. "He sang of the creation of the world, of the origin of man, and of all the history of Israel ”

“ Of Cædmon’s song Bæda gives a prose paraphrase, which may be literally rendered as follows:—“Now must we praise the author of the heavenly kingdom, the Creator’s power and counsel, the deeds of the Father of glory: how He, the eternal God, was the author of all marvels—He, who first gave to the sons of men the heaven for a roof, and then, Almighty Guardian of mankind, created the earth.” ”

“ All his poetry was on sacred themes, and its unvarying aim was to turn men from sin to righteousness and the love of God. Although many amongst the Angles had, following his example, essayed to compose religious poetry, none of them, in Bæda’s opinion, had approached the excellence of Cædmon’s songs. ”

“ Cædmon the herdsman, turning poet late in life by a special gift from Heaven and devoting himself exclusively to sacred subjects, is a different sort of minstrel from that one who is introduced in Beowulf singing the lay of Finnesburh. His motive is different. It is partly the same motive as that of King Alfred in his prose translations. Cædmon made versions of Bible history for the edification of Christian people.
Anglo-Saxon poetry, which had been heathen, Teutonic, concerned with traditional heroic subjects was drawn into the service of the other world without losing its old interests. ”

“ Since, however, we learn from Bæda that already in his time Cædmon had had many imitators, the abstract probability is rather unfavourable than otherwise to the assumption that a collection of poems contained in a late 10th century MS. contains any of his work. Modern criticism has shown conclusively that the poetry of the “Cædmon MS.” cannot be all by one author. Some portions of it are plainly the work of a scholar who wrote with his Latin Bible before him. ”

“ Bede, who wrote about Cædmon, said, "He did not learn the art of poetry from men, nor of men, but from God." Cædmon sang many songs, chiefly songs about stories in the Bible. Our first poetry was religious. "Dark and true and tender is the north," and true and tender is all great English poetry since that most precious of all the golden doors was thrown open in the Great Palace of English Literature.
Almost more interesting than the stories which Cædmon resung for the world is the story of the way the gift of song came to Cædmon. ”

“ Cædmon may be one of them: the question has been the cause of immense discussion, and remains doubtful.
The tone is haughty and peremptory in the impassioned parts; abrupt appositions keep the attention fixed upon the main quality of the characters, the one by which they are meant to live in memory; triumphant accents accompany the tales of war; the dismal landscapes are described with care, or rather with loving delight. Ethereal personages [Pg 72] become in this popular Bible tangible realities. The fiend approaches Paradise with the rude wiles of a peasant. ”

“ It is true that for two centuries and a half a considerable body of verse has been currently known by his name; but among modern scholars the use of the customary designation is merely a matter of convenience, and does not imply any belief in the correctness of the attribution. The so-called Cædmon poems are contained in a MS. written about A.D. 1000, which was given in 1651 by Archbishop Ussher to the famous scholar Francis Junius, and is now in the Bodleian library. ”

“ She made him at once give up the life of a servant which he had been leading, and bade him become a monk. Caedmon gladly did her bidding, and when he had been received among them, his brother monks taught to him all the Bible stories.
But Caedmon could neither read nor write, nor is it at all likely that he ever learned to do either even after he became a monk, for we are told that "he was well advanced in years" before his great gift of song came to him. It is quite certain that he could not read Latin, so that all that he put into verse had to be taught to him by some more learned brother. ”

“ THE CAEDMONIAN CYCLE Caedmon.—In 597 St. Augustine began to teach the Christian religion to the Anglo-Saxons. The results of this teaching were shown in the subsequent literature. In what is known as Caedmon's Paraphrase, the next great Anglo-Saxon epic, there is no decrease in the warlike spirit. Instead of Grendel, we have Satan as the arch-enemy against whom the battle rages.
Caedmon, who died in 680, was until middle life a layman attached to the monastery at Whitby, on the northeast coast of Yorkshire. ”

“ Caedmon, coming back from the frosty chapel, saw the stars shining in the brilliance of winter skies. His heart was suffused with all he had heard the pilgrims repeat; for the first time it entered his mind that the same stars that he saw twinkling, held their course at that glad time when "the morning-stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy,"—a prelude to this other song of "the great multitude of the heavenly host." He entered the hall, and when the company reassembled, he took his harp, and sang with power and pathos of the slumbering flocks on Judea's upland pastures ”

“ Modern criticism, however, has shown that the various portions of the so-called Cædmon poetry exhibit diversities of style inconsistent with the supposition of common authorship, and many passages indicate on the part of their authors an amount of learning which the monk of Streaneshalch cannot have possessed. The most probable conclusion seems to be that the rude Northumbrian verses of Cædmon were regarded by the writers of the Ælfredian and later ages as raw material, which they elaborated with unequal degrees of poetic skill. ”

“ I use the word "Caedmonic" to cover the poetry which used to be attributed to Caedmon, and which was probably written under his influence. That he did write much I have shown in Chapter I.
I cannot give the poem at full length, but in parts quote from it, and in part give the gist of it. It begins with a description of the Happy Land which is the home of the Phœnix. Far away in the East it lies, that noblest of lands, renowned among men. Not to many of the earth-owners is it given to have access to that country. God's power sets it far from the workers of evil. ”

“ It is of course possible to hold that the story of the dream is pure fiction, and that the lines which Bæda translated were not Cædmon’s at all. But there is really nothing to justify this extreme of scepticism. As the hymn is said to have been Cædmon’s first essay in verse, its lack of poetic merit is rather an argument for its genuineness than against it. Whether Bæda’s narrative be historical or not—and it involves nothing either miraculous or essentially improbable—there is no reason to doubt that the nine lines of the Moore MS. are Cædmon’s composition. ”

“ We may also notice the childish wonder of a rude, primitive, but brave people, who magnified a neighboring monarch of great skill and strength, or perhaps a malarious fen, into a giant, and who were pleased with a poem which caters to that heroic mythus which no civilization can root out of the human breast, and which gives at once charm and popularity to every epic.
Caedmon.—Next in order, we find the paraphrase of Scripture by Caedmon, a monk of Whitby, who died about the year 680. ”

“ In Northumbria, always the most literary district of early England, the lay brother Cædmon founded a school of divine poetry. But even amongst the disciples of Cædmon, some, such as the author of the very martial Judith, seem to have designed their work for the mead-hall as well as the monastery [112] . And the regular scôp by no means vanished. The Wanderer, a semi-heathen elegiac poem of the early eighth [Pg 31] century, seems to be the lament of a scôp driven from his haunts, not by Christianity, but by the tumults of the day [113] . ”

“ Is the song of the Exodus more abrupt, more vehement, or more savage? These men can speak of the creation like the Bible, because they speak of destruction like the Bible. They have only to look into their own hearts in order to discover an emotion sufficiently strong to raise their souls to the height of their Creator. This emotion existed already in their pagan legends; and Cædmon, in order to recount the origin of things, has only to turn to the ancient dreams, such as have been preserved in the prophecies of the Edda. ”

“ The type of the Anglo-Saxon poets in Christian times is Caedmon, whom Professor George Stephens called "the Milton of North England in the seventh century," and who, according to the legend told by Bede, being singularly unblessed with the power of song, received the gift miraculously in sleep. He is represented in the Cottonian library only by a few prayers in Anglo-Saxon (Julius, A 2) which Junius printed from this MS. at the end of his edition of Caedmon's paraphrase. ”

“ They deal with the hard and tragic things in life, the terrible power of ocean and storm, or the inexorableness and dreariness of death, banishment, and the separation of friends. In their frequent tender notes of pathos there may be some influence from the Celtic spirit. The greater part of the literature of the period, however, was Christian, produced in the monasteries or under their influence. The first Christian writer was Caedmon (pronounced Kadmon) , who toward the end of the seventh century paraphrased in Anglo-Saxon verse some portions of the Bible. ”

“ Enthusiasm is their natural condition; and their new Deity fills them with admiration, as their ancient deities inspired them with fury. They have hymns, genuine odes, which are but a concrete of exclamations. They have no development; they are incapable of restraining or explaining their passion; it bursts forth, in raptures, at the vision of the Almighty. The heart alone speaks here—a strong, barbarous heart. Cædmon, their old poet, [72] says Bede, was a more ignorant man than the others, who knew no poetry ”

“ Bede translates a few of them, which are very flat, but he generously lays the fault on his own translation, saying: "Verses, even the very best, cannot be turned word for word from one language into another without losing much of their beauty [Pg 71] and dignity," [87] a remark which has stood true these many centuries. Taken to the abbess Hilda, of Streoneshalch, Cædmon roused the admiration of all, became a monk, and died like a saint, "and no one since, in the English race, has ever been able to compose pious poems equal to his, for he was inspired by God, and had learnt nothing of men." ”

“ A roof high upreared, o'er the children of men;
The King of mankind then created for mortals
The world in its beauty, the earth spread beneath them,
He, Lord everlasting, omnipotent God. [28]
If Beowulf and the fragments of our earliest poetry were brought into England, then the hymn given above is the first verse of all native English song that has come down to us, and Cædmon is the first poet to whom we can give a definite name and date. The words were written about 665 A.D. and are found copied at the end of a manuscript of Bede's Ecclesiastical History. ”

“ And because of his poems the hearts of many men were brought to despise the world, and were inspired with desire for the fellowship of the heavenly life.... He was a layman until he was far advanced in years, and he had never learnt any songs. It was then the custom that, when there was a feast on some occasion of rejoicing, all present should sing to the harp in turn. And when Caedmon saw the harp coming near him, he would get up, feeling ashamed, and go home to his house. ”

“ Religious instinct is not acquired; it belongs to the blood, and is inherited with it. So it is with other instincts; pride in the first place, indomitable self-conscious energy, which sets man in opposition to all domination, and inures him against all pain. Milton's Satan exists already in Cædmon's, as the picture exists in the sketch; because both have their model in the race; and Caedmon found his originals in the northern warriors, as Milton did in the Puritans ”

“ This point of view, presented by mediaeval and modern occult sciences and confirmed by Celtic and non-Celtic percipients, when considered in relation to its non-Celtic sources and then at once contrasted with ancient and modern Celtic beliefs of the same character which constitute it—to be seen in the above Gaelic and Brythonic manuscript and other evidence, and in Cædmon’s theory that angels are small beings—plunges us into the very complex and extremely difficult problem how far fairies as pygmy spirits may be purely Celtic, and how far they may reflect beliefs not Celtic. ”