The Parable of Caedmon's Hymn: Liturgical Invention and Literary Tradition

by Bruce Holsinger , University of Virginia

To say that the story of Caedmon's Hymn represents the beginnings of English poetry is to surround this story with the same penumbra of miracle with which Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People shrouds Caedmon himself. If Caedmon's Hymn does indeed represent "probably the earliest extant Old English poem," as a recent edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature puts it, this designation nevertheless invents this fragment of vernacular writing as the dawn of a tradition of specifically literary making. The story of Caedmon's Hymn can be understood as the "miracle that made literary history," in other words, only if we understand Caedmon's Hymn primarily as literature: as a putative point of origin for what we have come to know as English literary writing.