Cædmon

C?dmon was an Anglo-Saxon herdsman, poet and monk attached to Streon?shalch (Whitby Abbey) during Hild?s abbacy (657 ? 681). He is one of twelve Anglo-Saxon poets identified in medieval sources, and one of only three for whom we have both roughly contemporary biographical information about his life and surviving examples of his work..

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Bede's Historia ecclesiastica

Summary of narrative

Our sole source of original information about C?dmon?s life and work is found in Bede's, Historia ecclesiastica, Book IV Chapter 24 (edited in Colgrave and Mynors 1969):

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According to Bede, C?dmon was a lay brother at Streon?shalch who was inspired to compose vernacular English poetry after a dream in which an unknown interlocutor approached him and asked him to sing principium creaturarum ?the beginning of created things.? He immediately produced a short eulogistic poem praising God as the creator of heaven and earth. The next morning he was taken to the abbess and her counsellors. They asked him about his vision and tested his gift by giving him a second commission, this time for a poem based on ?a passage of sacred history or doctrine? of their own choosing. When C?dmon returned the next morning with the desired poem, he was ordered to take monastic vows. He was given further religious instruction from which according to Bede he produced a large oeuvre of splendid vernacular religious songs. After a long and zealous life, C?dmon died like a saint: receiving a premonition of death, C?dmon asked to be moved to the abbey?s hospice for the terminally ill, where, having gathered his friends around him, he expired just before nocturn.

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Dating

Bede gives no specific dates in his story. C?dmon is said to have taken holy orders at an advanced age and he lived at Streon?shalch at least in part during Hild?s lifetime. Book IV Chapter 25 of the Historia ecclesiastica appear to suggest that C?dmon?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 C?dmon?s floruit, however. The next datable event in the Historia ecclesiastica is King Ecgfrith?s raid on Ireland in 684 (IV.26). Taken together, this evidence suggests an active period beginning in 657–680 and ending in 679–684.

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Modern discoveries

The only biographical or historical information 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 C?dmon?s ?own? language, the poet?s name is of Celtic origin: from Proto-Welsh and Brittonic *Catumandos (Jackson 1953, p. 554). Several scholars have suggested on the basis of this etymology, Hild?s close contact with Celtic political and religious hierarchies, and some (not very close) analogues to the Hymn in Old Irish poetry that C?dmon himself may have been bilingual (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 (see in particular O?Hare 1992, pp. 350-351).

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Other medieval sources

The Historia ecclesiastica

No other independent accounts of C?dmon?s life and work are known to exist. With the exception of the Old English translation of the Historia ecclesiastica, indeed, no explicit references to C?dmon or his story are known from English sources before the twelfth century other than Bede. The name itself is found nowhere else 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, the most significant being the claim that C?dmon felt ?shame? for his inability to sing vernacular songs before his vision and the suggestion that Hild?s scribes copied down his verse ?t mu?e ?from his mouth? (see Opland 1980, pp. 111-120). 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 C?dmon story (Wrenn 1946, p. 281).

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The Heliand

One possibly pre twelfth-century allusion to the C?dmon story is known from two Latin texts associated with the Old Saxon Heliand poem. These texts, the Praefatio and Versus de Poeta, 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 C?dmon?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. 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 sixteenth-century edition by Flacius Illyricus (Catalogus testium ueritatis ), both are usually assumed on semantic and grammatical grounds to be of medieval composition (see Andersson 1974 for a review of the evidence for and against the authenticity of the prefaces). This apparent debt to the C?dmon story agrees with semantic evidence attested to by Green demonstrating the influence of Anglo-Saxon biblical poetry and terminology on early continental Germanic literatures (see Green 1965, particularly pp. 286-294).

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Analogues to the C?dmon story

The Heliand prefaces are two of nearly fifty supposed ?analogues? to the C?dmon story identified by scholars since the early 1830?s. These analogues have been drawn from sources 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 Moslem scripture and tradition (good reviews of analogue research can be found in Pound 1929 and Lester 1974). Although the search was begun by scholars such as Sir Francis Palgrave, who hoped either to find Bede?s source for the C?dmon story or to demonstrate that that its details were so commonplace as to hardly merit consideration as legitimate historiography (Palgrave 1832), subsequent research has, perhaps ironically, instead ended up demonstrating the uniqueness of Bede?s version: as Lester shows, no ?analogue? to the C?dmon story found before 1974 paralleled Bede?s chapter in more than about half its key features (Lester 1974); the same observation can be extended to cover all analogues since identified.

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Whitby Abbey: Whitby Abbey is a ruined monastery sited on Whitby's East Cliff....

Hild: Hild is a character in Anime/Manga serries Oh My Goddess!...

Life: :For other uses, see Life and Living...