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Updated: May 25, 2025
The chief of these are Exodus and Daniel. They are all in an old book, called the Junian MS., from the name of the man, Francis Dujon, who first published them. The MS. was found among some other old books in Trinity College, Dublin, and given to Francis Dujon. He published the poems in 1655, and it is from that time that we date our knowledge of Caedmon.
You have only to compare Beowulf, the epic the Saxons brought with them from the continent, with the poetry of Caedmon and Cynewulf, or with such poems as The Phoenix, to see how Irishism tinged the minds of these Saxon pupils of Irish teachers with, as Stopford Brooke says, "a certain imaginative passion, a love of natural beauty, and a reckless wildness curiously mingled with an almost scientific devotion to metrical form."
And one ran quickly and told the good abbess, or mistress of the abbey, what strange thing had happened. "Bring the cowherd hither, that I and those who are with me may hear him," said she. So Caedmon was led into the great hall of the abbey. And all of the sweet-faced sisters and other women of the place listened while he sang again the wonderful song of the creation.
They closed the movement towards the sunset which Jute and Saxon began; they are the last, the youngest, and in politics the most richly gifted; yet in other departments of human activity not more richly gifted than their kindred who produced Cynewulf and Caedmon, Aidan and Bede, Coifi and Dunstan.
Caedmon, an unlettered Northumbrian peasant, was inspired by an Angel who came to him in his sleep and told him to "Sing." "He was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision." He wrote epics upon all the sacred themes, from the creation of the World to the Ascension of Christ and the final judgment of man, and English literature was born.
Caedmon was a peasant, a farm laborer in Northumbria working on the lands of the great Abbey at Whitby. Already he had passed middle life, and no spark of genius had flashed in him. He loved to go to the festive gatherings and hear the others sing their improvised poems; but, when the harp came around to him in due course, he would leave the room, for be could not sing.
Francis Junius collected Anglo-Saxon literature, and other books. He left them to the Bodleian Library. Among them is the unique "Caedmon" Manuscript, given him by Archbishop Usher, who founded the library of Trinity College, Dublin.
The spirit of Beowulf, softened and consecrated by religion, still persists in Anglo-Saxon thought and action. Caedmon. In 597 St. Augustine began to teach the Christian religion to the Anglo-Saxons. The results of this teaching were shown in the subsequent literature. In what is known as Caedmon's Paraphrase, the next great Anglo-Saxon epic, there is no decrease in the warlike spirit.
WHILE Caedmon was still singing at Whitby, in another Northumbrian village named Jarrow a boy was born. This boy we know as Bede, and when he was seven years old his friends gave him into the keeping of the Abbot of Wearmouth. Under this Abbot there were two monasteries, the one at Jarrow and the other at Wearmouth, a few miles distant.
Then it is in tune with the idea, so prevalent in English verse, that in sleep a mysterious undercurrent of imaginative power becomes accessible to the poet. There was surely no reason why Keats' title, Sleep and Poetry, should have appeared ludicrous to his critics, for from the time of Caedmon onward English writers have been sensitive to a connection here.
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