2023/12/01 by Hall, Alaric
#Literature #Medieval
paper · doi:10.57686/256204/26
Daniel O’Donnell comments, tactfully, that ‘few modern scholars have shared Bede’s enthusiasm for the intrinsic aesthetic quality of Cædmon’s work’ (§3.1). He makes little attempt to disabuse us of the implication that Cædmon’s Hymn is quite a pedestrian composition, despite its fame as one of the earliest and most widely attested Old English poems, or its fame for being claimed by Bede as the first Christian Old English poem. I share my colleagues’ scepticism as to the poem’s literary merits, and this is one of the reasons why, when O’Donnell’s edition of the text was originally published in 2005, I did not pay it any attention.1 Forced by its place in the English canon to deliver a lecture on Cædmon’s Hymn, however, I belatedly gave O’Donnell’s work the attention it deserved, in its 2018 online reissue.