Caedmon

Memorial to Cædmon, St Mary's Churchyard, Whitby, England.


I am intrigued by the story of the Anglo-Saxon poet Caedmon and the signficance Howe sees in it for our understanding of the transition from a purely oral to an increasingly textual culture.  Caedmon's ability to compose beautiful religious poetry in Anglo-Saxon after listening to monks' expositions of passages from the bible, in Latin, made Caedmon an admired member of the monastic community.  Nobody, it seems, felt the need to "teach" Caedmon how to read the written texts, not in order to keep him from that skill but because his skill of transforming what he heard into powerful, persuasive orations was so highly respected within the "early medieval textual community."  Howe does not emphasize Caedmon's skills as a translator, but this is what impresses me (and what I, at first, did not even grasp): that Caedmon apparently understood Latin (although he did not speak it?) and was able to translate it, on the spot, into Anglo-Saxon verse.  So, in this story, "reading" involves an impressive number of practices, performed by different people in a textual community: comprehending a written text; performing a "text" by reading it aloud or reciting from memory; listening and memorizing a "text" read aloud; translating the performance of a written text (latin) into a poem or hymn, something to be sung, in Anglo-Saxon.

I was struck by Howe's following remarks:
"To the question why the monks did not teach Caedmon to read, one might respond that it would have been a waste of everybody's time.  Less facetiously, one might say that the question itself reveals a misunderstanding of the nature of an early medieval textual community.  Established as he was within the monastery, Caedmon had no need to read alone and to himself. Indeed, his particular responsibility to transform Latin text into Old English verse emphasized the skills of oral performance rather than of reading comprehension.  We must also ask if the entire question of Caedmon's inability to read is not at least partially anachronistic in its assumption that this ability be defined by our own cultural practice as readers who exist in only the most tenuous of communities." (70-71, my italics)

Somehow I am saddened by our own narrow understanding of what constitutes reading!