Bede’s Cædmon: A bilingual scop from the cosmopolitan court of Oswiu?

Abstract

In a revisionist reading of Bede’s account of the miraculous transformation of the lay brother Cædmon into a skilled poet in the Anglo-Saxon vernacular, this essay proposes that his bicultural origins (British, Anglo-Saxon) and poetic skill won him patronage in the retinue of King Oswiu of Northumbria, promoter of the Christian mission of conversion and Hiberno-Latin learning, and founder of the Abbey of Whitby, to which his elderly retainer would have been retired. The adjustments to the story found in Bede, most importantly the omission of Cædmon’s early secular career, enhance his framing story of divine intervention in the birthing of a vernacular poet through a sequence of architectural contexts that are reflected on the greater scale in Cædmon’s own creation poem. Bede’s account of the poet and the chapters that bracket it in the Historia illustrate his overriding concern for Church reform.