BEI}E,S STORY OF C,ED}LdN: THE CASE HISTORY OF AN ANGLO-S;LXON ORAL StrNcERl

By FRAI{CIS P. I|IAGOUN, Jn
ltr', ch. 23, (24) of his Histciia Ecclesiastica Ge,ntis Anglorunt, completed in e.n. ?31, Bede" monk of Saint Paui's monastery, *lrrow, County Durham, tells the story of an ualettered farmhand, Cadman by name, who in an unexpected fashion, reportedly supernatural, developped the art of orally composing narrative verse on Biblical-Christian subjects. Cmdrnan, composing his songs some fifty years before Bede was s'riting, was an emplo;ree on the monastic estate at Strinss-h*Ie, today Whitby, about flfty miles scuth of Jarrow on the Yorkshire coast.? This chapter in Bede is of peeuliar interest to students of oral poetry,a as *'ell as to those of Anglo-Saxon literature, in tha.t it furnishes an aceount, a casehistor;. indeed, of certain parts of the career of an oral singer of the past. ft is the only such aeeount knor*'n to rne that goes track substantially earlier than the

Ix Book

memory of lir,'ing men. The chapter in question follows on, and is closely copnected *'ith, an eneorniastic appraisal (ch. 21 [g$j] of the rule of Hild (653-S80), buiider and ahbess of the \Yhitby found*.tion. Only the flrst two-thirds of the chapter, devoted to Caedman &s a singer of tales, is translated here; the rest has to dc with his death and is irrelevant to the matter in hanrl

THE STORY OF C,iSDMAN OF \YT{ITBY

Chaptcr
{relales}
92, {9,4)

${r$ a brothar ta whnr*, tke gift af singing d,iriwly gi*e* ddi*,initus eancesnsm). In the monastery of th*t abbess rr&s & eertain bmther especially marked try d.ivine grace. {d,&;ina grali* speoialiter i.nsignisr} in t}rat, he was in the habit of eomposing songs pcrtaining to rcligion and pietJi, sc that whatever he learned thmugh interprei-ers of Sac"Jd \Yritings he rendered the same in a short time in his onryr languege, namely, that of the English {Angloru.rn)" in poetical words (traditionatr formulas? sa'$is paaicis}, ccmposed with the greatest sweetness and most inspiring quality. By his rorrgr ih* spirits of ilany were ofter fired to scora of this sorld and to an eager desire for the heavenly life. And after
wes

lhd in hcr rnons,ste?g

l The present peper represente an elaboration of * pnrtion of the tlird {"Some Problems of the Future") of three Speeial lJniversity Lectures {series-iitle: "Oral-Formulaic Tradition in AngitiSaxon Poetry") delivered in the Senate House eif London LTniversity 94 January 1gd2. The Chart (p. 62' below) is a revision of a mimeographd eounterpart distributed at the third leeture. On the other leetures af this serie! ree Srxcul,uu, xxrinr (lSES), r$46, n. 1" ' For a general di.ccmslsn of Caduo*n and the llywn see Albert Ilugh Smith, Three Nrrthumbrian Pocm-r, ete. (London: *f,ethuen, 1$33), pp. 10-15, and for later bibliography George K. Anderson, The Litnrature af thc.4agI+'Sacoas {Princeton, l{ew Jercey: Princeton University Fress, 1g4$), p. 14d. 3 For significant work in recent Jrears oa the essentlal a*ture ead techniques of the orally composed poetry of unlettered singers see Srpcr.Ltd, xxvn (1S5S),446, notes 2-3; referenees to Parry given below are as defined there. For furth.er materia! orl the heroic soags of Yugoslavia see no&' Albert Bates Lord, Sarlo-Cro*tian Heaic Songe (Carrbndge, It{ass.: Harvard L'lniversity Press, l95B) , passim., for original texts and Ilnglish translations" See also n. ?o below. {s

5iI

#n{r'"s Sf*r.ty of C*dmon

him this and that person aurorig the peopie of the Englisir trieti tc compose religious poerns bi:t no onc was atrrle to rqual him {n'ulfus mrm aequip*,rare potuilll. For ire }rad learred the art of singing neither frorn rnen nor from man (ep. Gal,ati*ns, i" 1) but receil'ed the gift o$ singing tlivinely aided (dioenih.ts ad,iutu*). For this reason he was nercr able to compose any sort of trivial or purposeless pocrn, but cnly those whiclr. eancerned piety suited his devout tongua. lndeeci, he was established in a. sccular r*ay of life to the tirne of a rather advanced age {,prar;ectiltris aelcfas) rvithcut, ever having learned any songs {nil, eannd,num, ali.quando d,idicarat)" Consequently, sometimes at table wiren for the sake of merrymaking it was r.oted that one anii ali should take tursrs slnging, he, ncticing the harp {cithnra.} corning near him, r*'oulcl get up in the middie of a meal and, Ieaving, go back home. On a certain ocrasion he did this and, quitting the iranquet-hall, went out to the stable of the animal,s whose tending had t cen a^ssigned him that night and here at the proper time surendered his limbs to sleep. Then there stood hy him in a. dream a certain person, who, greeting him and also addressing him by name, said: "C*dman, sing me something." In reply, however, Cedman said: "I do not kror+" hor+. to sing; in fact I left the tranquet-hall and rctired for thc very reason tirat I could not sing." Again the person who u.as talking to him said: "\ieverthelessr )rou have in mind (something) tc sing for nae {mihi cantare habes)"" "\Lh&t," said Cedma;r, "should I sing?" lYhereupon the person said: "Sing of the beginnirrg of created things." On receir.ing this ansxr, Cmdmau immediately began to sing in praise cf Gad the Creator versrs which he hed ne\rer heard, of whichthesense

is this: 'oli<)w we should praise the Origiriator of the heavenly kingdom, the power of the Creator and l{is plan, t}re acts of the Father of Gior;r; how He, since God is eternal, treeame autlror of ali rairacles, (He) lVho ereated fust for tire sons of men {fi.li,Ls hwn*runt) Heaven as a roof of (their) abcde - aftern'ard the ahnighty Guardian of the human race (created) the Earth." This is the sense, though not the exact order of nords of *'hat Crdman sang in his sleep; for poems, ire they ever so *'ell composed (in the original), cannot be translated iiterally from one language to a.nothcr without detrimeat to their beauty and worth" lYhen he got up from hissleep, he remembered ever;,thing he had surrg while a-sleep and iil this ire iater added in the same st3.le more n'cxis of song x,orthy of God" And going next moraing ta tl:e estate-superintendent who w&s oyer him, he disclosed what sort of gift he had received and, on being taken to the abtress, hc was ordered in the presence of quite learned men to di**close his dream and to reeite the sang.. so that by their common judgment it might he determined x'hat it lcas or *'hence had come what he was reporting. And it seemed to all that divine grace had trrceu confered on him by God {coelestem ei, * Dmn*w co?raessortrz *sse gral'iam}. And they exprounded to him a certain topic of Sacred Story or Teaching, liidding trrim, if he could, to turn this into poetical rhytlim. trYhereupon ire, undertaking the task, departed and, coming back next morning, recited whai ire haci'oeen ordcred to recite, eoxnpcsed in exceilent verse. Accordingly, the atrbess, innrnediately appreeiating God's grace in the uran {amplerata graliam, ile'iin r'rro), irstructed him tc give up the secular*"ay of life a1d to adopt the naonastic. And when he had done so, she attaehed irim s.'ith all his krelongings to the company of the br*tlrrex in the rr:cna.stery and ordered hinn to be taughl the sequence of $aered Narrative. And rememirering er.er;rthing, he was able to lcain try ear (aud,i*nrto d,i*eers poterut) and, meditating on it. as a elean beast chews its cud, he n-ould turn (it) into the sweetest verse and, meltidiously re6choing this, made his teachers in turn Lis auditors. fle sang a.krclut. the Creation of tire \Yorld, the origin o{ the human race, &nd. the whoie story of Gemesis, about the departure of the Xsraelites from Eg3pt and the entry into the Pronnised Land, about very many other stories of $acred Scripture, abrout the Incarnation of Our Lord, the Passion. Resumectiou. and Ascension inta heaven, the eoming of the

Berle's Story of Cedman

51

Holy Spirit, and tht-' i.eaching of the Apostles. Li,kerise, he composed maly songs about the Last Judgment and the horror of Lfernal punishmeut, also^ many po""ms aUout ttr" su'eetness of the heavenly kingdom, also very **o3- others abcut divinc b*oefits and juclgments.

. " .a

Bede's narratil'e raises a number of issues which will tre dealt with in the follo:r'ing order: (1) ?he Traditional (Oral-formulaic) Character of the Oid-English Text of the Hgm,n' (g) ?he Date of Cmdman's Dream, His Age at that Time, and his Literary Background; (3) ;lnglo-Saxon Christian Poetry before Cmdm&n; (a) The I'{iracle: a Rational fnterpretation; (5) Cmdmau's Ultimate Repertor;,-; (6) lYhat Songs of Cedman have su*.,ived?; (?) Conclusion.
1. THE TRADrTroi\*AL (0RAI-F0RMULAIC) C,HARACTER

TEXT OF THE HYMTT

oF THE 0LD-ENGLISH

In the J)ftssage above, Bede, with some apologies, gives in Latin transiation a hymn or doxology t&ich Ccedman is said to have composed in his sleep at the prompting of a stnanger, presumahly felt by the dreamer to be a heavenly visitor, an angel. Apart from Bede's T,atin version we have also an Old-English lext presert'ed in the relatively enormous number of seventeen copies, of which lour giv" an Old-Northurnbrian versicn, thirteen \lest-Saxon (five in the \\rest-Saxon Bede, eight in rnanuscripts of the Latin Bede);6 among these eopies are a couple of trifiing variants (apart from rnere spetrling differences) which will be considered hriefly belon'" fn nine t;pographical lines, or better, nine pairs of verses -_ since Anglo-Saxon poetry is composed essentia,lly in verse units Cmdman eomposed -. of in his sleep his little doxr:log;'. Ernbetlished rnith the use the conventional rhetorieal device of parallelism or variation it says in efiect: "Let us praise God
{ Translated from Charies Plummer, Tren*.rabili"s Baedac etc., r (Oxferd, lggs), p5$-?61"

lligbr*z

Eeetesinetina Gentis Angk*um,

The harp that circulated at Crdman's clinner-t*ble, pertraps, too, in the Biowulf scenes mentioned 19, below, *as quite likeiy of the relativeiy small and hantly size of the Sutton l{oo harp recoRstructed in the workshops of Arnold Dolmetsch, ttd., at l{aslemere, Surrey, in eonsuitation witle arehaeological experts. According to Mrs Dotrmet*ch "The {sutton }Ioo) instrument was probably not of the iargest t-ripe" but one that x'ould be handed around the banqueting table" (reported in ,.The Sutton Hoo Bfusical Instrumenl," The ArthuzolaEbal Noros Lefuer, r, No. t [London, -Mus"um April 1g4g], 1l-13, x'ith figure). Photos of the recoastrueted harp on exhibit in the British *ay be ,u"r, in Rnpert L- S' Bruce-11{itford, "The Sutton Hao Ship-burial," Proeeed.inga of lh.e Royal lnst.itute of Great Britaitt, xxxrv, Ft iii, No. rss {1950}" Pl. II B" facing p.44?, and in SeaenJiqe A*ericon, 1=ol' 18d, No. 4 (April 1g5t), c't-30 pa*aim; there is aiso a plaie in Roslyn Rensch, ihc Harp, ete, iNew York: Philosophical Library, l9E0), p. 14, pl. fV, ffg. I. The identificotion snd reconstmetion of the Sutton Hoo harp highligh* the diseussion of the role of the harp in the delivery of Anglo-Saxon poetry by John C. Pope, inr Angn* aJ B6ooul! {Ne1g I{aveu, Connecticut: YalefiniversityPress, 1949), pp.88- i; or,th" harp in connection with Old Frisian poetry see SptrcuLUM, xxm i1S4g), S0gFor a brief diseussion of the harp in the general setting of the ship"buriai see most recentl_v Bruee}{itford in Robe.rt Howard Hadgkin, A frisb,ry of the Angla-Sacons, n {Brd ed., Orford, l95g), ?00. 5 On thc nanuseript-s, text, and variants ol lhe Hymn see Smith, o7t- cit., pp" 1-4 ()iorthumbrian lIss'),38-41 (Northumbrian and I4'est-Saxon rersions facing, with Northumbrian variants); also Elliot \i' K- Dobbie, Tka il{anus*i,pts oJ Cadm.cn's Eymtt ond.-Bede's Death Song iNew York: Columbia University Press, l9S?), pp. l$-4g, embraeing all terts.

in a.

Bed,e's

Sfory af Ced,man

and l{is rvorks" God frrst created heaven as a rool for men, then the Earth for them." The inspiration of the piece uray n'ell be iiturgicals Before exarnining lhe Hyrnn with a view to determining fhe nature of its iangu&ge! it wiil be well to stress thc fact that orally composed poetry b)'unlettered singers -.- or occasionallf' by lettered singers composing accordiug to the techas oppcsed to the work of lettered poets with nique of their unlettered fellows ready access to writing materials, is pr.rt together not word by word with deliberation and at leisure but rapidly in the presenee of a liveaudience by means of readymade phrases filling just rneasures of isochroaous verse capable of expressing erier]i idea that the singer may wish to express in l'arious metrical situations. These phrases may be called formulas and their use distinguishes the verse of the orally composed poems of unietterecl" singers whether Anglo-Saxon, Faroese,r Finnish,s llomeric.e or Serbo-Croatian,ro to mention no others. It is quite possible,
6

Smith, o'p. cit., p. 38, n. 1, esp. the liturgieal incipit: W& etulan

Got! hefi,an,

with which cp. Eymn

1a.

The highly formulaic character of the Faroese ballads is emphasired by llelmut De Bo,:r, Dda fiiraischen Lieder t{zs i{ibe}ungar*ylclu* (Ileidelberg. 1918), p. 8: "But particul;arly in the Faroese ballads the poeticai formula plays a:r absolutely domiuar:t role, incompara.bly more than in the Danish and Swedish trall*ds and, indeed, than in aay (other) Germanic [!] poetical gente"; p. .9: "The Faroese ballads have not sLoppecl with the formulaic }ine; they aLro have in large numbers forsaulaie stanzas and series of stanzas, i.e., traditional situatione *nd $cene!." These long formulas to which De Boor refers are in efrect "'themes," which, like formulas. may often form an impartant part of a singer's ctock-in-trade. From AS poetry reederu will recall the theme ol beasts eonventionally associated with the field of battle so popular with the singers and diseixsed hy myself in "The ?heme of theBeastr of Rattle in Anglo-Saxon Poetry," Ne*phibtagi^tche trfdtteilungen, r,vr {1955), forthcoming, with literature. On the lrasir of thematerials *n*l1"sed byJohn Aberercmtry in f,Ize Pra- aad, Protahi*tori.e Fi.nrz* . . . with the l{*.gic 'Son4rs cJ t}ze West Fi,*xs, n (London, 1898}, 40 fi., it is clear that the trrinnish nretrical cherms (l*itszmunt) were commonly built up out of an a-ssortment of themac familiar to the o'thcugh x-orked out in a great varlety of phraseoiory" singers {Ioe" ezf. p" 41, l. 3}. t O:r Finnish traditional or ruro-poetry, most familiar through Elias Lbnnrot's collecting and cementing together of fifty shortish narrative pcems under the title I{aJeraJo trut abundantly represented in lyrics (cp. Liinnrot's Katdele, Ka*talatar) and metric*l charms ilrlislurunotj, proverbs (sananlasku,tj, arrd metrical riddles (arooitakset\, see Domenieo Coneparetti, lhe Trsd,itin*al Paeirg o! the Fir*tt, translated frou the lt*lian by Isatrella M. Anderton {London, 1898}, esp. pp. ?-4, 10-15, 1& 6Q-S9, on various fea,tures characteristic of the oral b*ckground. For a very different kind of a study trut with rauch relevant matter see Kaarle Krohn, Kcleoala.tfadian puhtrished between 192it and 198 (Helsinki) io Folktore Fellows Com*,u*i*ali*ns, Nris. SS {1$e4), S? {f9?6). ?l.-fg tlg?7),75-76 (19e8). The formulaic charaeter (with traditional epithetr, reeurrent phrases and verses, parallelisna or variation) of the verse of the Kalevala emergee quite ciearly in the verse-translation of lYilliam Forsell Kiby, Kalesuls.: tke Lend af F(eroes, two r,olumes in "nEvsrlman's Library," (1S0?). It should be noted that the prose translaticn ol Kaleoala $faneoci<, Ifich.: Book Coneern, 1950) hy lllrs ;\ili Kolehmainen Johnson is so free ag suceessfully to eliminate most cf the ch*raeteristie features of the dietion. Through his (formulas), initial anaphora, relativeiy close and ciever inaitation of m*ny features -'nrepetitions" and paralellism ("'variation" cf Geraranic philology) ol Kaletala-verse Henry ll'adsworth tongfellow eontnived on the basis of r\nton Seliiefner's KoIe?rala, ilas Nationolepw iler Finnen, etc, ([Ielsinki, 1859), to illuetrate in The Song oJ Hiatr,alha (185$) many of the leatures of Finnish traditional poetry. It may be remarked that any striet reproduction of the quantitatively strict meter of this Finnish poetry (essentially trochaic tetrameler) is qr:ite impossible iu a aon-quantitative language like English. On all this see Tauno F. b[rxtanoja and Ernest J. tr{o5.ne, "Longfellow's Soag of IIiau'af&o and Kalwala," Arnerican Literature,:v i195$), 87-89,
?

Bed,e's Story of Ccdmatt

53

to be sure, to ecmp<ise very short poems nientall;- word by word and to memorise them, thus giving them a fixed text q,hich can be summoned up verbatim on occ11* sion, but this is not possible in the case of a poem of an}, substantial length. Limericks. for exa,mple, are ea.sil;. composed mentall;.- by people with a }<nack for that sort of thing, likewise sonnets. Coleridge says he retained and *rote down fiftyfour lines (out of two or three hundred) of. Kubla Khan, cornposed while in a laudanurn-incluceri sleeprl and in his blindness John Milton xas able to eompose short batches of I'erse and keeir these in rnind until the arrival of an amanuensis to take them down from dictation.l2 Appreciably more than that is out of the question rvithout the aid of rriting rnaterials. Caedman might theoretically have composed his Ilgrrnri word by word as rr'e compose poetry, but an analysis of the language makes abuadantly clear that the Nymn is made up entirely of formulas or s-vstems of formulas, in a word, that, its language is quite traditional. The late }'[ilman Pamy defineri a poeticai formu]a &s "a group of wcrrds which is regularly emploS'ed under the sarne metrical conclitions to express a given essential idea"I6 arrd these are marked an the Chart (p. sp, below) by solid uuderIining' As for s;,'sterns of formuias he w.rites: '*any group of two or more such like formulas rnakes up a sy'stem, and the system may be defined in turn as a group of phrases *'hich have the same metrical value and which are enough alike in thcught and words to leave no doutrt that the poet lvho used thern knew them not only as a single formula, trut also as formulas of a certain t;ryg."r+ The latter are marked on the Chart by broken underliniug" Following the marked text comes the supporting evidence,Iu i.e., instances of tnerses of the Hynm recurring elsewhere in the Anglo-Saxon poetical eorpus of some S0,S00 verses, a little more than that of the lliild and Odysse3r cornbined" To turn to the chart. Though mere repetition in a given poem or group of poems does not automatically constitute a formutra -- since a lettered poet may
e See Parry pc.rslrr." io See Lord's unpuhrlished Harvard thesis pasrairn" :1 Sec Coleridge's preli*rina'ry statement or hea.dnote to the poem in Ernest Thc Poema of Sarnual, Taglor Coleridg*, etc. (Oxford. 1gl?), pp" g95-?g?.
12

Elsrtley Coleridge,

ed-,

bliltmt [London, 1815], pp. 13O, 3?6). Masson supplements this with a statement by Jonathan Riehardson that Milton used to eompose forty lines at a time, surnnaon one of his daughters at any old hour, and clictate the same. Richardson further apeculates that Milton ultimaiely knew all Paradise l,asf by heart; this hy no means unequalled prodigl'of memory n'ould, of course, be pcssible if people read aloud the iflxed) text of the poem to him again and agaiu as it progressed. I3 Parry I, $Ct. la trd.em, f, 85 ff. 15 Quotations and line.refererces are esentialiy based on G- P. Krapp and E. V. K. Dobbie, edd., The Angb-Sacaa Poetie Rectrd,s, r-r- {New York: Columbia LTniversity Press, 19Bl-58), with spellings normalized on the basis af early l1est Saxon as set forth i*. Le* Langllrzs Bl{ademws, xr,v (lg51), 63-69. 'Iitle-abbreviations in a tbree letter cde of the tities of the poems cited here are based on the KrappDobbie titles; ebbreri*tions for tie titles of all Arglo-Saxsn poems will appear iu a forthcoming issue

Reported in David Stasson, Tke Lile af rtfil.tan, vr (London, 1gB0), 464*46S, quoting the poet's nephew, Edw'ard Fhiliips, to the efiect that Milton eomposed "in a parcel of ten, t:uenty, or thirty vemes at a tirne. which breing written dawn try whatever hand" (from lYilliam Godwin, Life

af

ol

Efudes AngLaiaar.

clt

Bede"s Sfory af Cedrnan

on occasion repeat lrerses of his ollm or borrow- a yerse from another poet for some forrnula, as definetl above, is most obvious and most easily rhetoricai purpose - a identi{ied on its second or third occurrenee. Thus verses 14, 2a, 2b, 3a, 4a, 4b" 5a,.5b, ?a, 8a, 9a" when compared with the supporting evidence, stand out clearly as formulas; ttrese occur exactl-v the same elsewhere or, as in the case of verses 4a and 4b, rvith some trifling change in inflection to fit a slightly different syntacticai situation, a minor adjustrnent over which a singer composing oraily would n*t need to ponder or hesitate" 3a. fr"uld.or-fader may be called a forrnula, not merely because this compound happens to oecur elsexhere but bec.suse it fiils a just measule of verse, here the .second mea,sure of a D-verse. Else*'here it will be noted that with some preceding unstressed word or worrls it lets the singer n:ake the second rlleasure of a B-verse. Much tlre same can be said of tirest s$p (5a), with the substitution for dresl of
on frympe-

4b. 6r owteolde, along with 5b, is one of the two verses where a substantial variant (orfl is recorde<i in the x'ording of the transrnitted texts, the varying w-ords being s"vlony-rns antl af equal metrieal and alliterative value. On the morning after the dream Credman must have sung either 6r ar ord anstealde, but not hoth; both phrases &re forrnulaic, though it $rill presurnabl5, never be possitrle to knon' which he uttered on that particular rnorniag nor does it really rnatter. Our texts may refiect a transcription of twa separate performa,nces, or one variant or other ma;,- merely be the work of an inadr,'ertent scribe. 5h. ieldabearnum is at once a formula in its own right *nd simultaneousiy one plrase of quite a large formulaic s3,stern ubearnu.m {-o), where for e a singer could use any one of a numter of wcrds in the genitive plural meaning "men"; the system is manifestly usefui to express the idea 'people' 'human teings' in the dat. Jrlur., Iess o{ten in the gen. plur., r'ithin ihe iimits c{ nn A-verse or ff,n A-type seconrl nleasure of an expanded lrcrse. Equally papular is d.ryhta and, mannabearxunz, {-c}, while heleEabearnzff* tai is u.sed fir'e times anrJ nippabearnum, (-a) six t.inres; li'ar{a becrvturn is recorded only cnce. The variant eor\an bearnunz,like l6oda bearnum at Chr 1424, does not oeeur elserr.here which is not to say that it x'as not in reiatively conlmon use by singers; for what this may be worth, however, it may be noted that it was evidently not usecl in the sersion of the Ilyran which reached Eede {filiis horninum) writing fifty or sixty years after Ceedman. Furthermore, eorUan bearaum. is not properly part of the forrnulaic slrstern under discussion in that eor6e"earlh" is no equir-alent of the various nords for o'men" used in the system" The formula may have been created on some analrrgy '*"-ith the formula ecrffan tzirlar {Gm 1A0l*,, XSt $57, Chr 6S8) b;r Cmdrnan hirnself or some later singer cf the tr{grnn. trn sum, there are oni.1'three out of eighteen verse.s cr sixteen-plus per cent (Sa, 6b, $a) which are not, whotrly or in part matched elsewhere; accordingly eightythree-plus per cent of the iangrage of the Hyrnn is demonstrabl-1, traditional. \Yere the surviving corpns trvice as extensive, t,here rnight. r'e1} have been no .l,'erse whose t.raditional character could not be demonstrated.

Berle's Slory of Ccdma,n

q. THIi DATE OF C,ODMAft'S DREAM, IIIS AGE AT THAT TI}IE, ANI} HIS LITERARY BACKGROL:ND

The l:eginning of Ciedman's public singing must have been bet*,een 658 and 680, the ycars of llild's rtrle as abbess of trYhitb-v, and no more precise daie is likel.l' to be arrived at on the trasis of our present sources" For practical purposes, honever, it is r:onrrenient to split the differenee and to imagine * rlate "o*p*o*ise Iike 6?0, forty-fir'e !-ears after ttre coming of Paulinus to }brk and thirtSr-five after Aiclan of Iona settled on HolS' Isle (tindisfarne) ofi the NorthumLrcrlan6 coast. Christianit;' had reached the south nearly seventl'-five years before this time' a.P- 6?0 is aiso close to the time when Aldhelm was singin! at }lalmesbur-v in the southrvest.ld There is atrso the question af Credrnan's age rvhen he began to sing * at, whatever ilat'e. Popuiar thought fr"orn the late ninth century on has tenteci to think of hirn as olcl at that time, really old, and so he ma-v have been. Becle describes hini as Ttrot:ectioris aeta{,i* "of rather adr-aneecl &ge," a somewhat re]ative indication. The hundred-.year-old Abraham and his ninety-year-old wife Sarah {Gen. xriii, 11) are said to be ambo senes prooeetae aedatis. Chaucer expresses about the same idea by the phrase somdeel stupe in age to clescrib" * poo, .,ri,ido*, who is otherx,ise otx,iously a healthy and r-ery vigorous woman! perhaps no1 a 4ay over thirty-five. The lYest-Saxon rendering of Bede's ynwectiori,s aetatis is letifdre ielde "*f {eeble or infirm old age" and seems to go a touch be5,6rr,1 Bede; to think or to elaim that this West-Saxon tradition rests on sorne sort cf continuing rvord to arouth tradition would be a shak;' business. To judge from the careers of the oral singers of Yugoslavia, rirany of *'hieh have treen colleeter{ ancl studied by Par;'and by Lord, it is unusual for a singer to rievelop in himself the art of sinjing after gror+'ing up; for the most part the.y .- and very iikely all oral singers of all tinre-* and piaces Iearn to sing in their teens, though becoming more adept, more polished rvith experience. One Yugoslav singer, hcwever, reportecl that he first Lregan to sing at the age o{ tN,ent},-eight.
*(ee Srpc.*Llrll, xx1:rlr (i953)" 454*455, n. 15, far the text *nd translation of williarn of }fallrcesburl''s important staternent' Irased on Alfred the Great, about Aldhelm as a singer. trTith other accompanf ing dis*ussion see Cyril Ernest llright, The CuttinatrxraoJ Scgo in Xnak>Sa*on Engla1nd (Edinburgh: Oliver and Bo-1'd, M39), pp. 2r-9e (with translation), p. 9i0, $e (Wiliiam's Latin texti; also Eleanor S' $uckett, slng[o-Saxorz Saeads ond Selrolar.s {New York: Macmillan, Igi?), pp" 4t{J 16

In cctuntries rvhere orsl singing is pr*ctieed the trest silging at any gir"en time seems to be colrcentrated in a certa.in region. fn present-day Yugostravia the hest is in the Rfuslim communities of Bosnia, Iferzegovina, and l{onteuegr.r; sonae trundred and twenty,five years ago and 1ater, Finrish collectors found the really good and rich ruo-siriging in eastern (Russian) Karelia, whieh is not to say that this had its origin there either as to form or substaace (see Kaarle Krohn op" eit., note g ahove, fFC' No' 53, pp.30 ff.)' (Jne has the impression, perhaps founded on insufficient data or a fauity interpretation of the surririing data, that the best Anglo-Saxon singing was in the north, but, the .lldhelm pas\Bge tqstifies to good si:iging in the south, at least in the seventh century; for claims (pot, I think, demonstrahle or substantiated) ol a southern origin of certain surviving Anglo*Saxon songs, see Ceeiiia A- If+tchner, Wesset a*C Otd-English Poetry, wirh Special Canside.raion oy tA, fir;r, 4N"r9
York, 1939).

5S

Bede's Sfary of Cedmun

"Saban B.ahmanovid in Biha6 told u-" [Parry and LordJ that he did not learn to sing unti] he was about tn'enty-eight (he w,as forty-five in 1935) and that hei Iearnerl his song.s frorn song-books, tbe. fuf atiea.hruatska in particular. Although he could not read, somelxrdy had read them to him" But he had also heard theolder singers in his district. . " . fn the case of Sahan it is very possible that he had heard man.y singers when he q,as .Y-oung _- he admits having hearrtr his uncle sing -- but tliat he did not attempt to learn the art until later."r? Since the learning period of an oral singer is extended a.nd posits a protracted period of listening to older singers and o{ absorbing formulas and themes, Lhere is no reason to suppose that Anglo*Snxon singers ordinariiy developed their art in an-v substantiai n'ay clifferent from the Yugoslavs. Since, however, a,s rrill eppea,r pp. 58-59, bloll', Caedman rnust have learnettr to sing well trefore his public appearance }:e{ore the angei and the TVhitby eommunity, it makes little difference at what age !!'e irnagine his d6but. To his monastic audience it er.idently seemed late old _* and one might, as well imagine him as fortyish or fiftyisli as anlthing else. Iri any el'ent, once he got going, he may actually well have gone on singing to a ripe olrl age indeerl"l8 Cdman's literary background consisterl of every song and story he ever listened to. traditional and secular or, relatively novel in the Anglo-Saxon world, religious, rvhether from singers of tales or from priests or nuns telling him Bible stories. All this conslituted a literary background as mueh as though it had come to hirn through his eye rather than his ear. At the tirne Bede's story begins, it is elear that tLere rlras a traclition of singing traditianal songs on the Ilhitby este,te. The basis of the c&reers of the overn'helming majorit;, of oral singers consists in listening ta other singers, ordinariiy their elders, and this is implied in Cmdman's case by the rvords "'in convivio, cum esset laetatis causa decretum, ut omnes per crdinern cantare r.ieberent"; in Crdman's set singing was patently a commonly practiced art. .lmong the r{nglo-Saxons in general the singing of songs, usualiy probatrly to the acccmpaniment of a harp, E.as a far.ored forrn of eltertainment on festive occasions as n"itnessed in Bdotruil b-v the setting of the Creation h.vmn (89b-gS), of the r.arious songs irnpiied in 856b ff., of the Lay of Finn (1063*1159ai, singing in the ss,me setting pickeri up again in pl0?-l3a (w-here we first learn that l{r6pga.r uas a singer in his own right}, and in Widsi,p 66-{?t) and 103 fi.1? Cmdman had no doubt hearrl mlrch singing in the course of his life on and cff the monaslic ests,te. One uiay appropriatetry ask n'hat sort of singing Cedrnan would have heartl
1? 18

Lord, thesis, p.

4S"

Tlrere n'ere agtl singers among the subjects of Lord and Pa,rry and similarly, including women as well as men, amollg F'innish runc-singers, ae reported in Comparetti, ap. cit. (note 8 above), p. lB and n. l, p. 21 and n. I; I{rohn, op. eit" (note I above}, FFC, No. 53, p- p0.
lq On the htrrp see n. 4, above. On antiphonai singing, possibly referred t"a in Wlds6p l0s-l$4 ("1f it Scielling... sang ah6fon"),_see Stefdn Einarsson, '-Ytixels*,ng i Wtd"$${?), Sturlu*ga och Finla,nd," Rud*arlen, xxx {TurkuT'Abo, 1P51), 1*-32,;on Finni:}r practicesee Comparetti, pp.69-?1, Krohn, loe. cii." pp. ?9-3$. There is a most effective painting, done in I845 by the Pollqh artist G. Budkox'ski and preserved in the FinnisL }iational Museum ($uomen Kensallisrnriseo) in Helsinki of the rnno-singers OIli K-r,uaiainen and Pietari Makkonen, singing thris with ihe kantele.

Bed,e's Sfary of

Cedm*n

5?

at such gatherings as he rvould have raostl;- attended at the monastery or have hearrl hefore the tirne of his empio.l.ment there. lmong the peasantry of his ehiltthood and ar)ong the help on the \Ttritb-v estate he must by ancl large have hearcl songs dealing with traditionai Germanic story or lyrical productions in connection with, say, weddings and funerals, perhaps on oecasion magical incantations. lYe canuot knorv for srrre, hut Bede does remark that traditional-secular themes rvere distasteful to hinr ('*nil umquam frivoli et supervaeui poematis faeere potuit.") lYhatever he did hear would have been composed in the traditional manner out of the standard reservoir of formulas and themes and in conformitS' with the traditional rnetrical patterns according to which alone the singers coulcl have sung. The story material, plots, would have been traditional, too; the deeds of great figures of the past or conceivably, if more rarell.. and more passingly, rnore contemporary events comparable to the much later .4{oldon, thougir none such harre come down to us in verse, In an.v event there is no reason to assume any .sort of specialtrSr peasant-t$e poetry, still less for irnagining that a man of Cadman's social standing rvould not have heartily enjoyed songs a,bout the great and qralthy of long ago. To this present day socially simpie people quite courmonl-v take an extraordinary interest in matters reported in the soeiety eolumns a{ nerrspapers. ?he folk-tales {Kzndrx- u,nd, Hau"sntd.rchm},collected by the Grimm brothers from flessian peas*nt women a centuryand a half ago, atound in roy-alty and in sr:mptuous settings, though often with curious and arnusing blends of courtly elegance and rustic simplieity. ft is in fact unnatural to imagine that C*dman's listening exlrerience before his becoming a practieing singer as limited or peculiar in any way. There is to be sure faulty and halting Anglo-S&xon verse (e.g., parts of the Fi,nn Fragm,erif, the disjointed narrative of the Wife's Lament, parts of some of the I'Ietrical Charra.s) but its tradition is or aspires to be identical *'ith the very best; it.s medioerity presumahly rnerely reflects poor performaBces try inrlifferent singers rvho in sorn cases }iave not quite remembered the song- The Oid-Gerrn&n L*y a! Hitd,ebrand, eomposed in the same tradition and in the same lralr es the Anglo-S*xon sorlgs] is similarly a technieally miserat:Ie perforrnanee. 9. ANGI,G-SAXON POETRY BEFORE C,IEDMAN

The language anri the sr:bject matter of tire l{ymn, as of the late poem Ctzri.st and Satan previously riiscussed,z0 raises the rluestion of the existence of Chrirtirn poetr;,- before Credman's day. The highly traditianai, formulaic language af the Hgmn inetrudes a number of formulas 'll.'irich eannot be easily i**gt"Jto have treen created or used in pre-Christian England, atrl with re{erenceslo the Deit3.': heafan-rites weord, (la), h{et*des meahte {2a}, Wuldar-fed,er {3a), dee Dryhten (4a, 8a). Fria eall-mrilift3 (sb). and /rdlf 3 Scieppend (6b), the last only by chance not represented elsewhere in the poetry. There are eight references 1o the Deity in eighteen verses, making up fort.1,-four plus per cent c,f the poem. It might be argued that Cmrhnan invented these anil the other formulas in his sleep, but
20 See

Srrcur,r.fu,

xxrlrr

(1953), ,154-458.

58

Bede's ,Sfory af Cadman

awake or asleep, if true, this w'oukl I:e miraculous indeed, sinee under ob'servable conditions formulas are created only slor*'l.r- and no one singer ever invents rnany, often none at all, frnding the ava.ilable supply quite adequate for his needs" Rut rnuch points to an early der"eloprnent of a supplementary diction making possible formulaie reference ta the Deity and other characteristically Christian matters and consequently it is tc be supposed that Credman had heard and learned enough o{ tlrese to be sufficient to his purpose in the Hgrnn and su}rsequent songs.
4. TIIE ITIIRACI,E: A RATIONAL INTERPRETATION

The nurnher of tirnes that Bede speaks of Cadman as having been divinely aided both in the eornpasition of the Elyrnn, and by inference, his referenees t<r Clndman's poetic gift as a matter of dir.ine graee, makes quite clear that Becle and almost surel-v the conamunitl, of Whitby vierved Cmdman's suddenly acquiretl ability to sing in public ior from their point cf vierv, perhaps, to sing at all) as an authentie miracie.n ft is not unlikely that, Becle in good mea.sure included the story beeause he viewed it as a rniracle or at least highly supernatural. But the ll{iddle Ages were generally speaking less critical of miracles than is the Church today and thus it may be easier and more natural here to seek for a rational erplanation of the event in question" .teeording to Bede's report Cmdman was in the habit of listening to the singing of Anglo-Saxon, and there seems to have been a singing tradition in the llTritby comrnunity, presumably of songs on trailitional suhrjects. It would further seem that his friends had some notion that he could sing if h.e wauld, otherw,ise x'hy did they urge him to sing in turn? One does not urge a person to play the violin in public if one knows that he has ner.er taken a Iesson or had the instrument in his hands. I{or ean any Tom, Dick, or Harry living in a cornmunity where there is oral singing sing if he is not a singer. Ilere cne might suspect that Cedman oc* casionally sang when aione or thought he was alonen say, when out in the fields tending his floek and that on ore or more occasicns he had been overheard. For
,t Cp" C. Grant Locmis, "'The Hiracle 1}'aditiens of ihe Yer:erabie Bede," SpEccr,EM, xxr (1946), 4r4*11S. On the wide-spread story of the giit af song acquired in one's sleep {ultinoately perhaps based on experiences similar to C*dmen's$ see A" H. Ssrith, op. er.l. {note I above}, p. 1d (with understanding cr:mment) and n. ?; also hl[agoun, *Ahe Praefalio and ]'srs?ro Associated with Some Oldfuz E{outr af Jeremiah D. M. Ford (Cambridge, Ilrtrassa*qnxon Biblica,l Poe$s" in 1{*d,iaexai "srsdias ehusctts: Harvard LTniversity Prees, 1948), p" 117 and n. 98, p. 1S5; this latter story, patently modelle<l on Recie, has no independent velue and tells us nothing suhst*ntial atrout any Old-Saxon singer. The Ieclaudic stcrry af the rhepherd Hallbjiirn, told at the very en<l of porleifs pdttur jarlsskakls ($9), o{Ters some interesting a,nalogiao irl stage-setting, with tLe revenant ska}d }orleifur substituting for Credman's lieavenly visitor {Gu6ni Jdnsson, tslendinga sbgnr, vm fBeykjavfl<, 194?], C33-?34). The curious reader is refemed to the extraordinarily paraliel but totall;r unrelated story of Moharnrucd's first revelation (see Kora*, Strah 96, 1*5,\ lsggiyed froan an angetr near Mecea about.r.p. S09: '"He was asleep or in a trance when he heard a voiee s*y: 'Read!' Ile said: 'I eannot read.' The voicc again ssid: 'Itearl !' Ife said l 'tr cannot lead.' A third time the voice, more terrible, commanded : 'trlead!'Hc said:'I4trat can f read?'The voice sairt:'Eead: In the ns.me of thy Lord Ilho ereateth, Creat*th man from a, clot.'" ete., quoted from lfahamlaed Harmaduke Pickthall, The trIeaning o! lhc {Jktriaus Kora&: A* Ezylan*tnry Trar*Iatian {I{ew Tork: The New American Lihrary, 19511
Allen and LTnwin), pp. x, 445.

Bed,e's Sro.y

af Ced.man

5g

tlre composition of the Hym.n and for his sutrsequent singing on Biblical and reiated themes he rnust have eommanded all necessary formulas, unless one assumes a truie miracle or disbeiieves Bede's statement. This comm.and of fornrulas and general techniqtre *ft* the dream can only mean a command of the sarne before the cirea,rn, in a u,ord, that Credman had been learning them over a long time, since childhcod or, if a late starter, since eariy manhood. tlis reai and sole difficulty wouid seem then to have been oniy an. unconqrierable fear and consequent ina,biiit.y to sing before an audience, to have suffered in effect a kinci of stage-fright; he may have been like a starnmerer who can speak quite clearly rvhen alone. On the night of the dreamn as no doubt on other occasions, he obviously wanted desperately to lie able to sing in public an<i cleartry expressed this rvish in the dream 1r3,, in effect, ordering himself to perform after some (self-) urging _- hefore the heavenly visitor. "l'trihi cantare habes," -he makes the angel say to hirn: "You have lsonething] in rnind to s.ing for me," as indeed he did. llhe dream anrounted to a call for help and, as it, was evolving, may weil have had for Cmdrnan some of the aspects of a nightrnare: he was being made (though by himseif) tc sing hefore a stranger, an aurlieuee, if only of one. The dream may have q'orked like shoek ireatment and har,-e broken the block. fn any event, after the drearn Cedman w'as abie and willing to sing and, from all a.ccounts, to sing fluently antl rrell, though onl;- on the basis of material associated with piety and religion. It will presumablS'never be possitrle to interpret Cmdman's drea.m completel-1' or to everyb*dy's satisfaction but an;r rational interpretation of the "mirae]e" would seem to point in the general direetion suggested here. fn an].'case there is ilo reason to doubt the essential facts reparted by Bede on the basis, direct or indirect, of lVhitkry tradition.
5. C.EI}}{AN'S LATIMATE REPERTORY

Cdman's history as a singer sutrsequent to the dream is straightforw-ard enough. Frarn the word go ..- we hear of no iearning period or the like he

evidently $'as a cornpetent singer cf Anglo-Saxor verse ("'mrllus eum aequiparare potuit").s? The day *fter the dream and the cornposition of the Hymn the monks totrci him a Bible story aud enjoinerl upon him the versification of the sa,me as a test. Ilere his Srrocedure !!ias perhaps that of a not v-ery experiencefl singer, at least as far as public performanees were concerned. Having mastered the plot materiai or "fatrrle" he is saicl tc have had a good memory -_ he needed or at least x'anted overnigirt to work out presumably the organization of the piece in order to render it, satisfactorii;'' the next day. L'Inless it u,as, iike the llymn, very short, he s'ould not have rnemorized it or been ahle to rnernorize a fixed text.23 Such an interval between mastering the nanative material and a perform*nce
2 Alfred's appraisal, qucted b3.- lYiiliam of Maimesbrrry; see n. LS, above. s One ua,1' think ins'rruetively of the uniei.tered Egill Skslla-Grimsson's nocturn*l compositiorr ol Ei$udlausn (7* r'erses) u:rder magrcal handic*ps, recited in York in g3?. This poem is short but not short enough, I shouid think, for Egill ta har.e completel3, memoriaed it in our sense of the word, though he must have planne<i it in eonsiderable detaii at some tirne, nhether originally intended for

60

lletl.e's Sfory af Ced'man

before a,n auciience is apt to characterize either an inerperienced singer or a perfectionist. Bede reports an exten-qive uitimate repertory, though nothing bel,ond the range of good oral singers;z4 this included songs based cn tales in the baok of Gene.ris, E*adus, and others, on the life of Oir Lord {materiai perhaps on the order of Ckrist l and 1I), the teaching of the ^A.postles (material perhaps emLrracing such apoorSphai tales as the Life of Sct.nfs tr{attkeut and, And.re?r} represented in the Aruirea*j, the Last Judgment (cp" C&rust Iil and Cirt,qi and Safan, as well as *ceparate teilings of this matter), and lots of other things ("et alia perpiura"). For all this he had to have texts read aloud and/or erpounded to him in English in order to rnaster the narrative. ilhis is not how most orai singers learn their songs, since rnost, songs in sueh a school are trased on olctr tradition which the singers have mastered during their period of absorption and iearning. But in Yugoslavia rvhere, as in Anglo-Saxon Bngiand, lettered a.nd unlettered persons live side by side, singers not infrequentl-v do iearn their songs from printed sources -* in turn from older oral sourees '- reatl atroud to unlettered singers try iettered friends. Saban Bahmanovie, mentioned on pp. 55-56 above, is a case in point. As for the length and forrn of Cmdman's songs, one can only say that these rnust have varied considerably from performance to performance and would depend *lmost entirely *n the audience factcr, i.e., how long a given a,udience might be able or wiiling to sta,y with him. The siuger of Etadus, for example, devotes trventy-nine t3'pographical lines (ll. 3S?-4gSi to the story of Abraham's ofrering of fsaac, the singer of Gmosis acLrut three times as rnuch space to the same story (ll.?84S-*9$S). Similarly* the singer of the Exeter Book poern' the Grfis af lfan, devotes IlS lines and of The Fortunes of tr{en some eig}rty lines to God's varied and unequal gifts to human beings, rvhile Cl,nex'ulf (Christ ff, u. 6iffi91) del'otes oniy thirty'three lines to the same topic, though ail three poems are treating of the same rnatter in much the same N,a;r, including the rhetorical use of init.ial anaphora {sum, sumum.}.2* 'fhis audience ean tre a live audience in a tavern, in the hali of an Anglo-Saxcn nohlernan, perhaps in his outbuildings, Gr it can be a tape-recorder or a monastic scribe; the latter r*'as cbviously the audience of ttrre perform&nces of such Anglo-Saxon sorgs as h*ve come down to us. A lettered singer, say, Cp'newulf, working in the oral tradition2s probably the only - -- rnight of way a.n Angio-Saxcn could canceive of composing native verse colrse
Eirikr bl6$itx of York or for Xing .4thelst6n of England. For the surrounding narrative of this curious
account of poetic composition q.nd the poem itself see Sigur6ur Nordal, Egile saga Skalls-Grfimstonar (cf" 5$-60), I{iil isleuzka Fornritafiag, rr (Ileykjavik, lggg), pp. ISI-109 ipp. 1BI a.d f,n": pd ganqa taft t niikkurt t{tit} or Gudni J6ns*on, isle*tfuga siigu?, tl(Reykjar-ik, 1946), 1g6-19?, and conPzir venientiy aceessible, though with an inferior text of the poem, in the l*te E. V. Gordon , An Introiluctixtnb AM Jforsa (Oxford, 199?i reprinted i* 1988), pp" 93*98. For an Bnglish version with an English verse rendering of the poem see Lee M" Hollander. Tlze Shalds (Prineeton lJniversity Press, ls45), pp. 6x-?S. 2a ()ood, mature oral singers majl prlssess repertoires running into seoreg of songs, i.e.o stories; cp. Coruparetti, pp" 90, 356-33?; Krohn, pp. 16 ad3tr. s Or"i this wide-sprea.tl iolk-rnotif see Bolte-Polivka sn Grimm No. 180 ("Die ungleichen Kinder

Evas"J.
26 See rrow Robert ltr. Diamond, The Dicrion of tke SignedPaems at Cynewi! {unpublishedllarvard thesis, 1S$S), 3rc.ssam.

Bed.e's .Sfor'y

af Cedtnan

61

dictate tc himself, t,haugh this n'oukl presumabil- be aE uncommcn if not arc,kllard procedure,
WIIAT SOI{GS OF C.IEDMAN IIA\G SL'iR\ITVEI}? Frorn a sentirnental point of vien'it. rrould be pleasant to think that apart from the iittle Hyrzn, short a,nd easily memorized, we had other songs or substantial remnants of songs i:y Cadrnan. I-inless, how-ever, the \liest-Saxcn translator of Bede is coryect in his apparentl;. entirely personai staternent that the monks of lYhitiiy took clcn'n Cmdman's compositions from dictation {er his nui:6e u;ritan}, lr presumatrly trave nothing of the sort. Our sole hope of identifying such would, in any event, iie in the survival of a text eontaining at the beginning or end such a statement as the "Prirno cantavit C*dmon istud carmen," made at the end of the Hymn in the hfoore manuscript of Bede. IJnless his compositions, i.e., given performances of his, rnere dictateri during his life-time and copies of these dictated copies had survir"ed, there woulcl b* no possikrility whater,rr of his "E'orksn' surviving in our sense of the word; for onal poetry knows nothing of fixit5. of text, since no song of any }ength can be memorized try a singer and each perlormance of a gir.en song rrill in wording !-a,ry a,ppreciably, often markedly, frorn one perfcrrnanee to the next. lrerbal similarities in different performances of the "same" song, Iike vertral recrme*ces in differ*nt songs lry different singers working in the sanre general tradition, will be due only to the fact that a singer wants to express the same general idea and as a matter of course uses the same cow-enient formula or forrnula.s to achier"e this end" Thus, local singers who admired CEdman's yerses rvould in a sense have "learned I:y heart" his snngs, that is, the subjects an<i perhaps his general ordering of the narrative, but fft.azr wording would not ard couid not possihly har,'e been ftrs wording, though they, espeeially yoltllg singerso might have fotrlorve.d his generaX technique rather closely. In such a way shreds, so to speak, cf Cmdroan's verse may lurk in the background of this or that Anglo-Saxcn poem deatring with the themes Cmdman is said to have silng about. Such, h.olvever, is the unfixity and irrrperms,nence of orally composed and crally transrnittecl poetry that we siraii alneasi surely ner'er be able to identify these shreds, if indeed they exist,t?
last renrarks bting to mind various attempts of modern scholars in varior:s ways to reconstmct Old-Germanic poems from digests incorporated liy late Greek aad tr atin authors anlmediaeval ch.ronielers in their s,'orks. Such material cries out to be used and has been put to mos{ helpful and iliuminating purposes in the eomparative stud;, of Germaaic heroic legend. Sueh r6sums, however, admit of ne 6smparison *'ith & suncur&ry we might make, sal.n of the fifth Aeneid, a book of Elomer, this or that Kaleval & runo, or a Serbo-Croatian lieroic song lying before us fixed in writing or in print. There rte would L'e digesting a n'{xd'" text. The writers mentioned above, unless perchance practicing ringers, have almost surely ordinarily transmitted a summary of a song heard long before, perhaps a singie recitation of it; or they mtly quite unconsciously be giving us a confl.ate version of their own based on many hearings of the stor;.- by many different singers. Sueh material is clearly to be used nith the greai.est circrrmspection and *-ith a iuil undext*.nding of its nature and presumable background. Howel*er interestiag and entertaining, one ean, lor instance, attaeh littie significance except *s * ieu d'esprit to such reconstruetions as liobir:rr*-* Dingfalwd in the charming German of that skilled translator of Old-Germanie verse, Felix Genzmet, in Germanisch-Ramawische l{o*r;tsschrift, xrxu (195I), 165-168, mentioned bere purell' b3' way of illustration.
t? These

6g

fied,e's

"tfory

of Cedma*,

?. CCII{CLU.SION Bede's story teiis one nothing about ihe l:irth af Anglo-Saxon poetr-v of any kind, not er.rcn of Christian r:aratir,'e \retrse, and it makes no claim to furnish such information. Bede does not even communicate the Anglo-Saxon text of the [Iym,n, furnished us by later scribes after his death; nonetheless it is of great interest to have in a Bedan context the text of this unpretentious, very short poem of no great originality o{ eonception though nicely organized along the }ines of a conventional little doxologS. 1\hat Bede does give us, however, is (as remarked at the beginning of this paper) of extraordinarSr irnportauce, from the past, indeed, a unique picture o{ part of the career, a case-history, of an oral singer iiving in a lettered community. Fcr the stucieni cf the vast field of the oral poetry of unlettered peoples Bede's chapter is a precious document, an invaluable record froru the past, Anglo-Saxor: or other.

Hanv*nn Uxrlxnsrtv
CHART
I,Iir x-6 scrlon herian heofon-rldes ll'eard,

-a"a nf"t"a"" *"uf,t" tti" *Aa*"par.q *-""" \,\'"ldo.+ma*r, ."'e Ua *r.*ar" Sehw*s, *,ee n.yht""., g (oar. ard)onsG1l4f._--=
H6 6rest {5e)sc6p ielda (var. eorban) bearnum heofcn to lr6fe h6,li5 Scieppend; p6 laiddan-:eard mann-cl'nnes lTeard, r*ee Dryhteri efter t6ode firum foldan Frea eall-mihti5.

la

meaht, 5eiiieran;

ireofon-rifesWeard;.Eie 1g?,445, 7tr8; DrE 91;Gdc 61J., 789; &{*t 11, 31; PPs 90, 1; Ps 50, 113 C; Jd.g II ?$. 2a XSt SSg,;And 694; Dara 169 pet h6 walde Metodes / meahte 5eliefar .5ST Metcdes :neahta, ti58" Gan 189 Metodes meahtum " Cp. Dan 20 Metodes m*gens ciepe; PIlr 6 purh }letodes meaht; Mst 29.48 l\fetodes cr,mfte" 2b trfet 31, 19; cp. Gen(B 253swrimihiti5ne / an hism6d-sep6hL;Bwf 1??Smannesmdd-gelanc;Ged63,159,4,9,941 26{7 m6d-ge}ances (instr.); M*s I123fu*r bi} maxnes / nbd-5ep*ncas.3a Cp. Clrr 21' mid plrrne lVuidorJader", I{en 147 mid 11'uldcr-fieder. 3b Cp. freqtnnf wundra (}ms fela (or worn) in Grain-Kd.|$,ar, 4a Aw lPB, BmJ 108, Soi 25'j,; PPs 53, 4, 70, 18, 20, 71, 1g 73,17, ?8, lef .teg.,'PsFr 5,1,?,87,89, 19 Cad.8.Ininflectedcasesnotc:gen.sing.ctee Dryhtnes Brb 16, trf en 1"9i 6ean Dryhtnes Gcn 7, 1885; C&r 396, 711; Phn 600; PPs S7, I 9, 68, 2,9; dat. sing" *6urn Dryhtne Bwf 9798, Jdg II 37i 9mP 26; acc. sing. 6ene Dryhter PPs 55, g, 85, L, 5, 7; 66an Dr.yhten fru;f 1692, 1779, ?830. 4b BwJ 2401:, Rdl 3, 59 6 onstelle; XS, ilg ord onstealdon. 5a Gen1'Lg,I{6r *rest sc6p;.&{sr 20,53 *rest gese6pe Aza 128 pet *r gesc6p; also OrIf 38 Hwct, on frSrnle sesc6p; PlLr 84 36 hit on {rym}, sesc6p; Gen\9tV?hAH.A Adom sc6p. 5b Cen?,472; Chr 937, Ord 99(-o); Runl1; cp. furthe dr5'1r1u bearnum G*z 993, &f m 228, Par 25, Sie 1103(-a); h*le6e bearnum Dan 898, Xf.

8f6 N* m6 me5 hr6awan; A{od, 751f }iA Fii meaht 5ecn6wan; Eln 511 N* }f Baf 395 Nri 3 m6ton gangan. lb Gen 1363, 1484" 1744, 2fi73i Eco 486 Donl*,26; X,SriXg0 rr-ir ie bed h6.lsie /heofon-rf6es lYeard; Aild.59, herede on heortan,
Gen

KIII

Beil,e's Story af Ced,man

63

1554, PPs l35n ?, 144, 11; nipla bearnum Gcn LlSs{-g.), tqg4, Rdl97,6{-a), Bu! r005(-c), Men 196, Run 9Y, FPs 58, 5(-e). 6a ITo supporting evidence. 6b Cp. Grein-Kohler for frcguent h6,li5 Dryhten and Cftr tll7 milde Sceppend. 7a. Dan 636 st6d middan-5eard; Gm 986 pes middan-:eard, l5S4 eall |es rniddan-5eard; fie 521 pet h6 middan-5eard; Rdl gl, r Is pes middan-5eard; W'an 89 Swi |es middan-3eard. Cp. frequeut adv- gen. middan-5eardes, forming an .4*verse, e.g., &r 136, 1206, 13?8, and other poems .7a Gen ?758, 9g96. 8a see sa, above. Bb cp. Gen 469, s2s eefter libban; Bud lg, efter cenned, gr3l efter wurde; Anil rB9, Jwl 19? after weot'dan; Rdl 39,23 *Iter gangep. ga No supporting evidence. gb Gen 5, 116, 1S0,1?3,852,904, 1359,14??; Chr 1379;JudSof; Pps 68, 14,69,6, g5, 17.