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Updated: May 25, 2025
He was also a poet, inferior only to Caedmon. Nor was his knowledge confined to literature alone; it was extended to the arts, especially architecture, ship-building, and silver-workmanship. He built more beautiful edifices than any of his predecessors. He also had a knowledge of geography beyond his contemporaries, and sent a Norwegian ship-master to explore the White Sea.
He translated books of geography, history and religion, and it is from Alfred that our English prose dates, just as English poetry dates from Caedmon. For you must remember that although we call Bede the Father of English History, he wrote in Latin for the most part, and what he wrote in English has been lost. Besides writing himself, Alfred encouraged his people to write.
Later it was thought to be Icelandic, and it was Haigh who first thought that Caedmon and no other was the author of the runic verses which he deciphered, considering that there was no one living at the period to which he assigned the monument, who could have composed such a poem but the first of all the English nation to express in verse the beginning of created things.
The Authorship and Subject Matter of the Caedmonian Cycle. The first edition of the Paraphrase was published in 1655 by Junius, an acquaintance of Milton. Junius attributed the entire Paraphrase to Caedmon, on the authority of the above quotations from Bede. For us it is mickle right that we should praise with words, love with our hearts, the Lord of the heavens, the glorious King of the people.
Then mid-earth, the Guardian of mankind, The eternal Lord, afterwards produced; The earth for men, Lord almighty. "This," says the old historian, who tells the story in Latin, "is the sense, but not the words in order as he sang them in his sleep. *Bede, Ecclesiastical History. Awakening from his sleep, Caedmon remembered all that he had sung in his dream.
There is no need to understand every word of this "glad kind greeting"* any more than there is need to understand what some great musician means by every note which his violin sings forth. *Carlyle. The writer of that song was, like Caedmon long ago, a son of the soil, he, too, was a "heaven-taught ploughman."* *Henry Mackenzie.
He should know intimately the great verse which involves spiritual problems, and human strife and aspiration, Milton, Beówulf, Caedmon, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, ballads, sagas, the Arthur-Saga, the Nibelungenlied, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Herbert, Tennyson, Browning, Dante and Christina Rossetti, Whittier, Lowell, Longfellow, to say nothing of Goethe, Corneille, and the Greek, Roman, Persian, Egyptian, Hindu, and Arabian verse.
So here again, perhaps, we can see the effect of the Celts on our literature. It was from Celtic monks that Caedmon heard the story of the war in heaven. After telling of this war, Caedmon goes on to relate how the wicked angels "into darkness urged them their darksome way." "They might not loudly laugh, But they in hell-torments, Dwelt accursed.
Literature reflects the inner struggles of the period: the war-song of Brunanburh, the mystic light which hangs upon the verses of Caedmon, the melancholy of Cynewulf's lyrics. Yet what a contrast is the England delineated by Bede with Visigothic Spain, with Lombard Italy, or Frankish Gaul, as delineated by Gregory of Tours!
"On his head the chief his helmet set," and he, "wheeled up from thence, departed through the doors of hell lionlike in air, in hostile mood, dashed the fire aside, with a fiend's power." Caedmon next tells how the fiend tempted first the man and then the woman with guileful lies to eat of the fruit which had been forbidden to them, and how Eve yielded to him.
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