Transcript Slide 1

St. Bede
&
Caedmon’s Hymn
Contents
- St. Bede- life and
works
- Caedmon- life and
ascribed works
- Caedmon’s Hymn- an
alliterative vernacular
praise poem
St. Bade- life and works
Bede, also Saint Bede, the Venerable Bede, or Beda
(from Latin), was a Benedictine monk at the
Northunbrian monastery of Saint Peter at
Wearmouth.
His scholarship and importance to Catholicism were
recognized in 1899 when he was declared a Doctor
of the Church as St. Bede the Venerable.
Life
Very little is known about Bede’s life- the only historical evidence is
a notice made by himself in his work- Historia ecclesiastica gentis
Anglorum (The Ecclesiastical History of the English People)-he was
placed in the monastery at Wearmouth at the age of seven, then he
became a deacon in his nineteenth year, and priest in his thirtieth,
remaining a priest for the rest of his life. He implies that he finished
the Historia at the age of 59, and since the work was finished around
731, he mast have been born in 672/3. He died on Wednesday 25th
May 735. It is not clear whether he was of noble birth. He was
trained by the abbots Benedict Biscop and Ceolfrid, and probably
accompanied the latter to Wearmouth’s sister monastery of Jarrow
in 682. There he spent his life, prominent activities evidently being
teaching and writing. There he died and was buried, but his bones
were, toward the beginning of the eleventh century, removed to
Durham Cathedral.
Work
Bede’s writings are classed as scientific, historical and theological,
reflecting the range of his writings from music and metrics to
Scripture commentaries.
The most important and best known of his works is the Historia
ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, giving in five books and 400 pages
the history of England, ecclesiastical and political, from the time of
Ceaser to the date of its completion. The first twenty- one chapters,
treating of the period before the mission of Augustaine of
Canterbury, are complied from earlier writers such as Orosius,
Gildas, Prosper of Aquitaine,the letters of Pope Gregory I and
others, with the insertion of legends and traditions.
After 596, documentary sources, which Bede took pains to obtain
throughout England and Rome, are used, as well as oral testimony,
which he employed with critical consideration of its value. He cited
his references and was very concerned about the sources of all his
sources, which created an important historical chain.
There are, it has been estimated, in England and on the Continent, in all
about 140 manuscripts of ‘ Ecclesiastical History’. Of these, four date
from the eighth century. Researchers state that two of them point to a
common original which cannot be far removed from Bede’s autograph.
Various translations have been made throughout the years.
We may trace a division of historical subjects or periods roughly
analogous to the division into books. Book I contains the long
introduction, the sending of the Roman mission, and the foundation of
the Church; Books II and III, the period of missionary activity and the
establishment of Christianity throughout the land. Book IV may be said
to describe the period of organization. In Book V the English Church
itself becomes a missionary centre, planting the faith in Germany, and
drawing the Celtic Churches into conformity with Rome.
Bede’s scientific writings
A historian of science- George Satron- called the eighth century ‘ The
age of Bede’, Clearly Bede must be considered as an important
scientific figure. He wrote several major works: a work On Time,
providing an introduction to the principles of Eastern computus
(calculation of the Easter date); and longer work on the same subject;
On the reckoning of Time, which became the cornerstone of clerical
scientific education during the so called Carolingian renaissance of the
ninth century. He also wrote several short letters and essays discussing
specific aspects of computus and a treatise on grammar and on figures
of speech .
His works were so influential that late in the ninth century Notker the
Stammerer, a monk of the monastery St. Gall in Switzerland, wrote that
‘ God, the orderer of natures, who raised the Sun from the East on the
forth day of Creation, in the sixth day of the word has made Bede rise
from the West as a new Sun to illuminate the whole world’.
Caedmon
Caedmon is the earliest English poet whose
name is known. His only known surviving
work is Caedmon Hymn- a nine-line
alliterative vernacular praise poem in honour
of God he supposedly learned to sing in his
initial dream.The poem is one of the earliest
attested examples of Old English and is one
of the candidates for the earliest attested
examples of Old English poetry.
Life
The sole source of original information about Caedmon’s life
and work is Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica- Book IV. For most
of his life Caedmon worked in an animal husbandry for a
monastery, living with the non-religious, and reporting to the
reeve, a steward who supervised abbess’ estate. When the
workers routinely ate together in a hall at a table, they
entertained each other by singing lyrics to a hand-held harp,
passed around. Before Caedmon’s turn to sing came, he left
for the stable where he kept the livestock overnight. One time
when his turn came to sleep with the animals, he had a
dream. In it a man called him by name and told him to sing.
When Caedmon explained that he could not sing to the
others, the man asked him to sing to him instead.
When Caedmon said that
he did not know what to
sing about, the man told
him, ‘the Creation of all
things’. In the dream,
Caedmon did so, with
verses he had never
heard before. Awaking,
he remembered his
dream and the song, and
added more to it.
The religious to whom Caedmon performed his song later attributed his
singing as a gift by God’s grace. He mast have seemed to them like one
of the disciples in the gospels whom Jesus had called by name to God’s
service. Creativity in making songs, to them, happened when a greater
power took over the poet and made him its voice. However, the monastic
brothers were wrong about Caedmon’s ‘gift’. The man in his dream gave
him, not the verses, but the subject matter. Caedmon, and only he,
composed the verses. What astonished the monastery scholars was the
immediacy of his composition. The verses came out without work or
prompting of memory.
Caedmon does not say that he created his song after waking up, but that
he remembered it. Bede clearly explains that one of Caedmon’s abilities
was to store up what he was taught in his memory.
Later on Caedmon was ordered to
take monastic vows. The abbess
ordered her scholars to teach him
sacred history and doctrine.
After a long and pious life,
Caedmon died like a saint:
receiving a premonition of death,
he asked to be moved to the
abbey’s hospice where, having
gathered his friends around him,
he expired just before nocturns.
Caedmon’s Hymn
Caedmon’s poetry is said to have been exclusively
religious. Bede reports that Caedmon ‘ could never
compose any foolish or trivial poem, but only those
which were concerned with devotion’ And his list of
Caedmon’s output includes work on religious
subjects only: accounts of Creation, translations
from the Old and New Testaments, and songs about
the ‘ terrors of future judgement, horrors of hell,
…joys of the heavenly kingdom,… and divine
mercies and judgements.’ Of this corpus, only the
opening lines of his first poem survived- The Hymn.
Now let me praise the keeper of Heaven's kingdom,
the might of the Creator, and his thought,
the work of the Father of glory, how each of wonders
the Eternal Lord established in the beginning.
He first created for the sons of men
Heaven as a roof, the holy Creator,
then Middle-earth the keeper of mankind,
the Eternal Lord, afterwards made,
the earth for men, the Almighty Lord.
The Hymn has by far the most complicated known textual
history of any surviving Anglo- Saxon poem. It is found in
two dialects and five distinct recensions.
Each Old English line has two balanced phrases with four
stressed syllables, three of which alliterative. Each half line
if uttered musically, in time to the plucking of a harp, would
fit nicely into our memory.
Caedmon’s hymn has just two sentences, which can be
summarized: ‘ Let me now praise God the Creator’ – lines
1-4, and ‘God created Heaven, earth and man’ – lines 5-9.
Things to remember:
Note that Bede, who wrote in Latin, is not the ‘author’ of
Caedmon’s poem, which he translates into Latin and
incorporates into the Ecclesiastical History. Caedmon’s
Hymn was composed orally in Old English alliterative verse
by an illiterate cowherd named Caedmon sometime
between 658 and 860- possibly before Bede’s birth, and
long before Bede wrote the Ecclesiastical History
(completed 731). Note that Old English was not a written
language: poetry was composed in an oral- formulaic style
and recited aloud, from memory, to an illiterate public.