Myth of the Anglo-Saxon Oral Poet, The

Western Folklore, Winter 2003/Spring 2003 by Niles, John D

Here is one feature of Bede's account of Csedmon that oral theorists are likely to take as an expression of myth-making rather than a record of Northumbrian social history. Albert B. Lord has written a clear account of how oral poets in the Balkans learn their craft, and it is not normally like this. The normal way that oral poets become adept in their art is by passing through an apprenticeship during which they gradually internalize their craft. Only after the completion of this learning process, which may take years, do they break through into public performance.20 If lurking beneath Bede's account there does exist an historical Casdmon, then that man would have mastered the arts of song gradually as he matured from being a passive tradition-bearer to being an active or strong one.21 Casdmon's originality would not have pertained to his gift of song per se. Rather, it would have consisted of his appropriation of the native verse-form and poetic vocabulary of the Anglo-Saxons to express, for the first time, themes drawn from Latin Christian letters.

If Book IV, chapter 24 of Bede's history has a hero besides Casdmon himself, then that person is the Abbess HiId (ca. 614-680), who became Casdmon's patron soon after his poetical gift was revealed. Bede makes clear how dependent Casdmon became on HiId and the brethren of the monastery of Stroneshealh.22 It was those monks who provided Casdmon with stories, deriving chiefly from Scriptural history, so that after a period of rumination he might turn them into "the sweetest verse." It was then they, according to Bede, who took down Caedmon's words in writing, thereby adding some more pages to the small mountain of Scriptural paraphrase and commentary that was growing by a process of accretion throughout the Middle Ages. If what Bede is constructing in this part of his history is an aetiological myth that accounts for the origin of English poetry on devotional themes, then what that myth chiefly affirms is not the status or power of the bard. Rather it is the power of writing, in a monastic setting, to absorb and subsume all things. For Bede, the power of writing specifically subsumed oral poetry, such as Casdmon's hymn of praise; oral history, such as the story of Casdmon's marvelous inspiration (which had not previously been recorded in writing); wntten history, such as the British monk Gildas's account of the English Conquest, a work that was a major influence on Bede's account of the same events; papal bulls, such as the letters of Pope Gregory the Great that are quoted intact towards the end of Book I; and saints' legends, including his own previously-composed prose life of St. Cuthbert, which forms the basis of the extended account of that saint in Book IV, chs. 27-32. It is writing, for Bede, that subsumes the only thing that he would have regarded as valuable in the old oral poetic tradition: namely, its ability to offer up words of praise in rhetorically heightened language. It is writing that has the power to turn all aspects of experience into more writing, in a world-building process that has never ceased to exercise its power to assimilate knowledge into new configurations of what is called reality.