Cædmon's Hymn...

The main thrust of my Latin course is my translation (and essay on) of St Bede's The Ecclesiastical History of the English People. When I first read this book years ago, I found it rather tedious, and in all honesty, only read it in order to have said ''I read it'' - not having much of an interest in the obscure and minor points of English church history, miracles, stories etc; so when I relegated it to underneath my bed (I only have one bookcase in my room, dedicated to Tolkien books - which I read most often - and elsewhere books are either stacked up along walls, stuffed in drawers, or the ones I read seldom, under my bed), I thought I'd never have to look at it again. When I began the more advanced Latin course at University, I moaned when I saw what the course entailed, but I am actually finding it more interesting in Latin than in English. At the moment, I am translating Book IV, Chapter XXIV, about the earliest English poet Cædmon, a herdsman attached to the double Monastery at Whitby during the Abbacy of St Hilda. On the night of a certain feast, where there was much song and a harp was passed to him, he got up and went home (being ignorant of the art of song), but that night, he was visited in his dreams by a man who saluted him and besought him to sing something. This he did, and he made a fitting song unto the Creator:

Quo accepto responso, statim ipse coepit cantare in laudem Dei Conditoris versus quos numquam audierat, quorum iste est sensus: ''Nunc laudare debemus auctorem regni caelestis, potentiam Creatoris et consilium illius, facta Patris gloriae: quomodo ille, cum sit aeternus Deus, omnium miraculorum auctor extitit, qui primo filiis hominum caelum pro culmine tecti, dehinc terram Custos humani generis omnipotens creavit.'' Hic est sensus, non autem ordo ipse verborum, quae dormiens ille canebat; neque enim possunt carmina, quamvis optime conposita, ex alia in aliam linguam ad verbum sine detrimento sui decoris ac dignitatis transferri. Exsurgens autem a somno, cuncta quae dormiens cantaverat memoriter retenuit, et eis mox plura in eundem modum verba Deo digni carminis adiunxit.

My translation:

When he heard this reply, he immediately began to sing in praise of God the Creator verses which he had never heard, of which this is the sense: ''Now it behoves us to praise the maker of the heavenly kingdom, the power of the Creator and his counsel, the things made of the Father of glory: how he, since he is the eternal God, stands out as the author of all miracles, who first, as the almighty Guardian of the human race, created for the sons of Men the heavens for a roof, and then the earth.'' This is the sense, not however the order of the words themselves, which he sang while sleeping; for neither are songs able, however well they are composed, to be translated literally from one language to another without loss of its decorum and dignity. But arising from sleep, he retained the memory of all that he sung sleeping, and soon added more words to the songs in the same manner, fitting for God.

The Anglo-Saxon staves, of which St Bede gives a Latin rendering, exist in an Old Northumbrian version of The Ecclesiastical History commissioned by King Alfred for the edification of the people. The song was written in the alliterative metre of all traditional Anglo-Saxon poetry, which I produce here. Interestingly, notice the word middangeard (Middle-earth). It is likely that Tolkien knew well The Ecclesiastical History, and since the form was common, and meant simply the ''lands of Men'' between the seas (or not uncommonly, between Heaven and Hell), it is hardly surprising for it to crop up in Bede:

Nu sculon herigean heofonrices weard, meotodes meahte and his modgeþanc, weorc wuldorfæder, swa he wundra gehwæs, ece drihten, or onstealde.
He ærest sceop eorðan bearnum heofon to hrofe, halig scyppend; þa middangeard moncynnes weard, ece drihten, æfter teode firum foldan, frea ælmihtig.

The above silhouette shows the ruins of Whitby Abbey, plundered by the Vikings in the 9th century, founded again in the 11th century, and similarly plundered by Protestant visitors (wreckers more like) when Henry VIII was sovereign.