The Harmony and Wholeness of Medieval Spirituality in Caedmon’s Hymn

The oldest surviving English poem was composed by an illiterate farmhand who saw divine goodness in the wonders of Creation.

I want to begin the Via Mediaevalis newsletter with Caedmon’s Hymn, a seventh-century text that, despite being short and simple, has much to teach us about the substance and contours of early medieval spirituality.

The story behind the composition of the hymn is almost as poetic and charming as the text itself. Caedmon was an unschooled Northumbrian cowherd who, according to an early English historian named Bede, experienced a miraculous infusion of poetic genius.¹ The first fruit of this artistic miracle was a song of divine praise now known simply as the Hymn. After receiving the gift of poetry, Caedmon took monastic vows and composed many other spiritual songs, all of which are lost to history. Now honored as the father of English-language sacred poetry, Caedmon never could have imagined that people would be talking about him and admiring his verbal artistry thirteen hundred years after his death. He composed poems quite simply to obey his monastic superiors and express his love for God, whom he understood as “heaven-kingdom’s Guardian,” “Glory-Father,” and “holy Creator.”

Bede’s tale of Caedmon and his Hymn is delightfully told and well worth reading. Here is my paraphrased version of the original, which was written in Latin:

Caedmon had never learned anything of composing verses. Therefore, when there was a feast and all wanted to make merry by singing in turn, if he saw the harp come toward him, he would rise up from the table and go home.

One time when he did this, he went to the stable to care for the cattle. He fell asleep there, and then someone came to him in a dream, calling his name.

“Caedmon,” the man said, “sing me something.”

“I cannot sing,” he replied, “and that is why I left the banquet and came to this place, because I could not sing.”

“Nevertheless,” the man said, “you must sing to me.”

“What must I sing?” he asked.

“Sing of the Creation.”

And immediately Caedmon began to sing verses to the praise of God the Creator—verses he had never heard before.

Caedmon lived in the era of Old English, a language that was much more Germanic than modern English and, despite having many recognizable words, must be learned through formal study. The text below gives you Caedmon’s Hymn written in the West Saxon dialect of Old English. Accompanying each line is a literal translation that may sound rather strange, but these translations preserve more of Caedmon’s poetic style and help you to make some sense out of the original words.

Nu sculon herigean    heofonrices Weard
Now we should/must praise    heaven-kingdom’s Guardian,

Meotodes meahte    and his modgethanc
the Architect’s might    and the thoughts of his mind,

weorc Wuldor-Fæder    swa he wundra gehwæs
the work of the Glory-Father,    when he of all wonders,

ece Drihten    or onstealde
the eternal Lord,    established the beginning.

He ærest sceop    eorthan bearnum
He first created    for the children of earth

heofon to hrofe    halig Scyppend
heaven as a roof,    holy Creator (Shaper);

tha middangeard    moncynnes Weard
then middle-earth,    mankind’s Guardian,

ece Drihten    æfter teode
the eternal Lord,    afterward made

firum foldan    Frea ælmihtig.
the lands for men:    almighty Master.

Caedmon’s Hymn in a twelfth-century manuscript known as Magd. MS.Lat.105.

The Hymn is a poem, but it’s also a song, and it was meant to be heard rather than read—the mysterious messenger in Caedmon’s dream said “sing to me,” not “write for me.” It’s helpful to listen to a recording of it, even if you can’t understand Old English, because there is music in the sounds of the language, and music always has meaning. I highly recommend a rendition by Lukas Papenfusscline, linked below. We can’t possibly know what the Hymn sounded like when Caedmon sang it, but Lukas has succeeded in creating a soundscape that conveys an intense feeling of Anglo-Saxon aesthetics.

One of the first things to notice about Caedmon’s Hymn is its thoroughly distilled subject matter. Though Caedmon undoubtedly had encountered the many detailed doctrines of medieval Christianity, his first poem is a meditation on two things: God and His Creation, with the latter divided between earth and humankind. There is an awareness that all religion is built upon the fundamental experience of living as a sentient and self-conscious being in “middle-earth,” that is, in a physical world poised between the divine realms above and the shadowy realms below.² This middle-earth is, in fact, a mysterious and often precarious mingling of those two realms: a day has darkness and light, a year brings heat and refreshment, in a forest are found sweet foods and savage beasts, and soil is the principal source of biological life—until burial, when it becomes the definitive sign of death.

Caedmon’s answer to this disconcerting, paradoxical existence is God—the “Guardian,” the “Architect,” the “almighty Master” whose perfection and goodness and unfailing providence are known from the harmony, beauty, and cyclical permanence of Creation. Caedmon has peace in his soul, not because human life is free of physical and spiritual dangers, but because God is within him, and God’s earth is beneath him, and God’s heaven is above him—“as a roof,” he says, as though all the world is his home. This is a song of wholeness; these are the words of a man for whom body, spirit, earth, and sky are diverse wonders that all begin in “his modgethanc,” that is, in the eternal thoughts of the divine Mind.

More than a thousand years have passed since Caedmon composed his inaugural poem, and yet, it can still elicit a reaction very much like that of the first people who heard it:

Caedmon was brought to the abbess, and was asked to tell his dream and repeat his verses in the presence of many learned men, that they might give judgment upon the gift that he spoke of. He did so, and it was clear to them all that he had been granted the heavenly grace of God.

1. The story is found in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Book 4, Chapter 24), which is the only reliable source of information on Caedmon’s life.

2. Caedmon’s Hymn is a good reminder that the term “middle-earth” existed long before The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien himself commented on this in a letter: “Middle-earth is not an imaginary world. The name is the modern form ... [of] an ancient name for ... the abiding place of Men, the objectively real world, in use specifically opposed to imaginary worlds (as Fairyland) or unseen worlds (as Heaven or Hell).”