Cædmon's Hymn

Cædmon's Hymn is a short Old English poem attributed to Cædmon, a supposedly illiterate and unmusical cow-herder who was, according to the Northumbrian monk Bede (d. 735), miraculously empowered to sing in honour of God the Creator. The poem is Cædmon's only surviving composition. The poem has a claim to being the oldest surviving English poem: if Bede's account is correct, the poem was composed between 658 and 680, in the early stages of the Christianization of Anglo-Saxon England. Even on the basis of the surviving manuscripts, the poem is the earliest securely dateable example of Old English verse. Correspondingly, it is one of the oldest surviving samples of Germanic alliterative verse, constituting a prominent landmark for the study of Old English literature and for the early use of traditional poetic form for Christian themes following the conversion of early medieval England to Christianity. One scholar has argued that Bede perceived it as a continuation of Germanic praise poetry, which led him to include a Latin translation but not the original poem. The poem is also the Old English poem attested in the second largest number of known manuscripts — twenty-three — after Bede's Death Song. These are all manuscripts of Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People. These manuscripts show significant variation in the form of the text, making it an important case-study for the scribal transmission of Old English verse.