Praising God's creative ability even seems to function somewhat as a boast. And the reference to "heaven as a roof" may evoke the security of identity with an implicit comparison to the enclosure of the mead-hall. As always in Anglo-Saxon culture, the Old Testament God works better than the New. The hymn well represents Old English poetry, with its lines of four stresses and a medial caesura, with its two or three alliterations per line, with the stacking up of epithets (God is guardian, measurer, lord, creator, master). According the the legend, Caedmon had a mystical experience in his cattle shed in which he was given a calling to sing: first, about Creation. The generic scene described does sound like a mead-hall revel. Modern commentators presume that Caedmon actually "concealed his skill from his fellow workmen and from the monks because he was ashamed of knowing 'vain and idle' songs" (24). of the Abbess Hilda and of her monastery at Whitby.
What little we know of Caedmon, the Anglo-Saxon Milton, as he is properly called, is taken from Bede’s account Ecclesiastical History, IV, xxiv. "Therefore, at feasts, when it was decided to have a good time by taking turns singing, whenever he would see the harp getting close to his place, he got up in the middle of the meal and went home" (25). Caedmon is the earliest English poet known to us by name.
The hymn itself was composed in the mid- or late-7th century and so is the earliest surviving Old English poem.īede records that Caedmon was an illiterate farmer working for a monastery who at first avoided singing. 673-735) embeds this Anglo-Saxon hymn and the legend of its creation within his Latin text, An Ecclesiastical History of the English People, a book that describes the spread of Christianity in England. Kenning compounds/poetic metaphors (banhus, hwalrad) Caedmon's Hymn background The so-called Venerable Bede (c.
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