Cædmon's Hymn

Summary

Cædmon's Hymn is a nine-line poem in praise of God the Creator and the oldest surviving English poem whose maker is known by name. It survives because Bede told its story in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, finished in 731. According to Bede, Cædmon was a layman of some years at the double monastery of Whitby, ruled by the abbess Hild. When the harp was passed round at a feast and every guest had to sing, he would slip away in shame. One night, having left such a feast to guard the cattle, he dreamed that a man called him by name and asked for a song. When Cædmon protested that he could not sing, the visitor told him to sing of the beginning of things, and he sang verses he had never heard before. On waking he remembered them and added more. Hild's learned men judged the gift to be from God and tested him with a passage of holy teaching, which he brought back the next morning as verse; the abbess then persuaded him to take monastic vows. For the rest of his life he turned the sweep of sacred history, from Genesis and the Exodus to the Passion, Ascension, Pentecost and Last Judgment, into English song. The hymn moves in two steps. The first four lines call the hearers to praise and name what is to be praised: the might of the Maker, his purpose, and the wondrous works of the Father. The last five lines follow the order of Genesis 1, telling how God first raised heaven as a roof for the race of men and then established the world below as their home. Nearly every half-line gives God a new title, Ward, Maker, Father, Lord, Ruler and Almighty, so that the short poem becomes a litany of names. The stored text gives the hymn twice in Cosette Faust and Stith Thompson's 1918 alliterative translation: once on its own, and once inside their translation of the Old English version of Bede's account.

Top Lessons

• Creation is the first subject of praise

  Asked to sing of the beginning of things, Cædmon sings of the Maker before the made: he praises God's might and thought, and only then tells of heaven and earth. The hymn teaches that the world is understood rightly when it is received as a home built by someone for someone.

• A gift given to the least likely

  Bede's story turns on Cædmon's shame: the one man who left the feast rather than sing becomes the first English poet. The gift is tested by the abbess and her scholars before it is trusted, and then it is put to use for the whole community.

• Old forms, new matter

  The hymn uses the inherited tools of Germanic verse, alliterating half-lines and a heap of varied titles for a lord, and turns them to the praise of the Creator. It shows how a Christian culture can take up the craft of its ancestors rather than discard it.

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