rel="nofollow" href="#uedff503b-e039-5441-90e0-8c4135a43048">The Earliest English Poetry
It begins in Yorkshire, on the coast by Whitby, in the year 657. Peat-smoke, the sound of waves and gulls, and winding through them the music of a harp, and words chanted in a language and a dialect so far-away we can barely understand one of them.
Nu sculon herigean heofonrices Weard,
Meotodes meahte on his modgeðanc,
weorc Wuldorfæder, swa he wundra gehwæs,
ece Drihten, or onstealde.
He ærest sceop eorþan bearnum
heofon to hrofe, halig Scyppend;
þa middangeard moncynnes Weard,
ece Drihten, æfter teode
firum foldan, Frea ælmihtig.
It’s a very simple little hymn, and the traditional starting point for English poetry. Later on, we’re going to hear a lot from the educated and self-confident elite of the British countries, poets from the great cities and the courts of barons and kings. But we start with a middle-aged man, Caedmon, whose name isn’t English – it might be Celtic – and who was a herdsman looking after bullocks and heifers before he joined the great monastery of Abbess Hild as a farm labourer.
He was too shy to take his turn singing poems with the other labourers and monks, and retired to a stable where he fell asleep and had a vision in which he was told to sing about God. His story was told to the abbess, who commanded him to sing, with wonderful results.
We know about all of this because of the great chronicler Bede, who was working in Jarrow just fifty years after it all happened. Bede insists, again and again, on the remarkable nature of what Caedmon did. Why? In modern translation his hymn sounds pious but almost blandly straightforward:
Now we must praise the Guardian of Heaven,
the might of the Lord and his purpose of mind,
the work of the Glorious Father; for he,
God Eternal, established each wonder,
he, Holy Creator, first fashioned
heaven as a roof for the sons of men.
Then a Guardian of Mankind adorned
this middle earth below, the world for men,
Everlasting Lord, Almighty King.
This hardly seems like the beginning of the great story of English poetry. But almost everything about it should unsettle our sense of who we are, right at the beginning.
Let’s start with the obvious, the Christian theme of the poem. Caedmon’s world had been, until relatively recently, a pagan one. Christianity had arrived in Britain long before, towards the end of the Roman era; and it was strongly established in Wales, Ireland and western Scotland, in the Celtic Church whose rites went back to early Rome. Since then, however, the waves of Germanic invaders – Angles from Denmark and northern Germany, the Saxons and the Jutes – had pushed the old Romano-British and Celtic inhabitants to the west, re-establishing paganism as they slaughtered, and then settled.
Now, Northumbria, one of the new and powerful Germanic kingdoms of Britain, was being reintroduced to the religion of Christ by missionaries from the Scottish island of Iona, themselves originally Irish. In modern times, we often assume that new ideas bubble up from the south and move north – and for centuries the Celts and the Irish were regarded by the southern English as barbarians. All wrong: right here at the beginning of the story, the new Christian religion had been brought southwards and eastwards from the north and west. Caedmon’s monastery itself had been founded by Irish monks.
Eventually, a different form of Christianity would push up across the Channel, and establish a new base at Canterbury, after Pope Gregory I sent Bishop Augustine to the court of King Aethelbert of Kent in 596. But when our ploughman made his poetry he was living in the Celtic religious world, not the English one. Caedmon’s Northumbria, with its monasteries at Lindisfarne, Whitby and Jarrow, was a great European centre of learning until it fell to the Vikings. And if many today think of Canterbury as the natural home of ‘English Christianity’, let’s remember that Canterbury’s power owed much to the arrival of a Greek, Theodore, and a North African monk, Hadrian.
Caedmon’s Britain was differently shaped from today’s state. After the withdrawal of the Roman Empire, the islands were a hodge-podge of tiny warring statelets: warlords passed power to their children and established royal dynasties. These slowly congealed into larger kingdoms. The great ethnic division was between the Celtic or British people still surviving in the west and north, and their enemies, the immigrant Germanic tribes of the south and east. Today ‘Welsh’ describes the land and the people to the west of Offa’s Dyke, the smallest of the nations of Britain. But around the time Caedmon was writing, the ‘Welsh’ were everywhere. There was for instance a kingdom of Welsh-speaking people to the north, centred on Edinburgh, fighting for their survival against the Saxons of Northumbria.
The tragic war poem about their failure and slaughter, Y Goddodin, is considered one of the earliest Welsh poems; it’s classic, heroic-battle-against-the-odds stuff, though it perhaps didn’t help its three hundred heroes that they had spent a year getting drunk on mead before they finally went into battle. Although the Anglo-Saxons and the Scandinavians were pushing the British or Celtic people back, there was no sense that one side was more cultured than the other. The heroes of Goddodin seem, as it happens, to have been Christians fighting pagans.
Does any of this matter much? Only because we need to shake up our ideas about what the very words ‘British’, ‘English’ or ‘Welsh’ mean. This was a harried, violent and marginal archipelago in which the offer of Christianity spread remarkably fast because it promised a happy and tranquil life after death – a great alternative to the cold, dangerous and relatively short experience of life in Northumbria, or anywhere else.
But it would also be a mistake to think of Caedmon’s Britain as simply a wilderness of macho warlords. Note, for a start, that he answered not to a man, but to a woman – the abbess. For much of the Anglo-Saxon period, religious institutions for men and women existed side by side, with female religious leaders highly literate and, in their own way, powerful. Very little writing by them has survived, but we know enough to understand that in the world of the Church, at least, women could be as powerful as princesses. Second, from artworks that have survived, in gold hoards or the glorious illuminated manuscripts, we know that the Britain of Caedmon’s time had a highly developed artistic sense; its people valued intricacy, complexity and show-off display. Although in translation his hymn may seem simple enough to us, in the original Anglo-Saxon it was a dazzling weave of assonance and rhythm, as carefully wrought as a letter colourfully inscribed in the Lindisfarne Gospels.
So, what of the language itself? I’ve called it Anglo-Saxon, and that’s the term most scholars would use; but that’s a very loose description of something that was in fact written in a specific Northumbrian dialect.
The marvel of Caedmon, according to Bede, was that he could pour out poetry while being, by the standards of the day, an uneducated man. In other words, he didn’t speak Latin. Today we are used to thinking of Latin as the dry, dead, elite language of scholars and priests. Back then it was still the left-behind language of the Roman Empire, heard all over the place. In fact, it seems to have been more used in the west
