Reading Caedmon's Hymn: One Poem, Two Dialects, Many Copies

Caedmon's Hymn survives today not as a single fixed text but as a tradition of copies, twenty one known manuscript witnesses in total, spanning from the early eighth century to the fifteenth, all ultimately deriving from Bede's own Latin paraphrase of the poem in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Bede gave readers only the sense of the poem in Latin prose, noting that verse cannot be translated word for word without losing its beauty; it is later scribes, working in the margins and interlinear spaces of copies of Bede's history, who preserved the actual Old English verse itself. The earliest surviving copies, the Moore and Leningrad manuscripts, both eighth century products of Northumbrian scriptoria, give the poem in the Northumbrian dialect Caedmon himself would have spoken; the majority of later copies, tenth century and after, translate it into West Saxon, the literary standard of later Anglo-Saxon England, and textual scholars distinguish several further recensions within each dialect group by small but consistent word choices. One change tracked across the tradition captures something of the poem's own theological ambition: an older poetic formula for praising an earthly king, rices weard, keeper of the kingdom, becomes in Caedmon's Hymn heofonrices weard, keeper of heaven's kingdom, the inherited vocabulary of court poetry redirected, in what Bede calls the first Christian verse composed in English, toward praising God instead.