Caedmon

Caedmon's Hymn survives today not as a single fixed text but as a tradition of copies, twenty one known manuscript witnesses in total, spanning from the early eighth century to the fifteenth, all ultimately deriving from Bede's own Latin paraphrase of the poem in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Bede gave readers only the sense of the poem in Latin prose, noting that verse cannot be translated word for word without losing its beauty; it is later scribes, working in the margins and interlinear spaces of copies of Bede's history, who preserved the actual Old English verse itself. The earliest surviving copies, the Moore and Leningrad manuscripts, both eighth century products of Northumbrian scriptoria, give the poem in the Northumbrian dialect Caedmon himself would have spoken; the majority of later copies, tenth century and after, translate it into West Saxon, the literary standard of later Anglo-Saxon England, and textual scholars distinguish several further recensions within each dialect group by small but consistent word choices. One change tracked across the tradition captures something of the poem's own theological ambition: an older poetic formula for praising an earthly king, rices weard, keeper of the kingdom, becomes in Caedmon's Hymn heofonrices weard, keeper of heaven's kingdom, the inherited vocabulary of court poetry redirected, in what Bede calls the first Christian verse composed in English, toward praising God instead.

Caedmon's reputation as the founding figure of English religious poetry grew large enough to attach itself, mistakenly, to poems he never wrote. In the seventeenth century the philologist Francis Junius acquired a tenth century illustrated codex containing four Old English biblical poems, Genesis, Exodus, Daniel and Christ and Satan, and, on the strength of Bede's account of Caedmon's own gift for turning scripture into verse, named the collection the Caedmon manuscript, a title that stuck for centuries. Modern philological analysis has since dismantled the attribution: close study of vocabulary, metre and regional dialect features shows the four poems were composed by at least five different poets working in different centuries and different parts of Anglo-Saxon England, none of them demonstrably Caedmon himself, and the codex is now known properly as the Junius manuscript rather than his. The correction does not diminish Caedmon's actual standing so much as illustrate how large it became: readers for three centuries found it more plausible that an entire anthology of vernacular biblical poetry belonged to the herdsman Bede named than that Anglo-Saxon England had produced several other poets working in a tradition Caedmon is credited with starting. Bede's own, narrower claim, that Caedmon was the first English poet whose name is known and the first to turn scripture into English verse, is the claim that has actually held.