Caedmon's Hymn: The new text, with context, reading, and translation

Added: 2026-05-18

[00:00:00]First of all, 15 seconds to tell you why I'm the person to talk to you about this. I am a specialist in increasing circles of specialization, Indo-Uropean languages, Germanic languages, Old Norse in terms of the history, the development of those languages. And Old Norse is right next to Old English and that's medium circle of Germanic languages.

[00:00:21]Anyone familiar with Old Norris is familiar with Old English. I might not be in the 100th percentile of PhDs to talk to you about old English, but I'm in the 99th percentile. Now, let's talk about this new story because it's being misreported a little bit. The two big misreportings that I'm hearing about a uh manuscript, the newly discovered Old English text are a that this is somehow the earliest known text of our earliest known Old English poem. That's an exaggeration. It's not the earliest text, but it's an important good text.

[00:00:55]And the second misrepresentation that I'm seeing is uh wild misrepresentations of what the Old English text is. And that results from people recording it that don't know Old English and they're misinterpreting some letters as being letters that they are not. Okay. So what this text is is Cadman's hymn which the venerable bead he's always called says in his text originally written in the early 700s in Latin his ecclesiastical history of the English people is a poem composed in old English by an illiterate peasant named Cadman to honor the Christian God early in the Christian history of the English people.

[00:01:38]So this poem would have been composed in the 600s originally and our manuscripts of bead's ecclesiastical history uh largely are much later than even bead's life. So this new manuscript it's not new obviously this manuscript that is kind of newly come to scholarly attention is important because it is relatively close to bead's life. It's from the early 800s and when you can get within a century of a medieval author, that's a pretty good deal. Um, so, you know, it's it just like in modern times, medieval hits often aren't recognized until after the author's life. And, uh, you know, today it might take 10 years, but back then that might take a hundred years.

[00:02:26]Okay. So, Cadman's hymn is often regarded as the earliest poem in English. And I should clarify what old English is because it's not Stonehenge.

[00:02:36]Uh just because something is old and from what we today call England, that does not make it old English. Old English is a special term for the language brought to Britain in the 400s AD from the North Sea coast of the European continent. So the North Sea coast of what we today uh border up into Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands.

[00:03:01]And because of its provenence from that area of speaking Germanic languages, English is much more closely related uh very obviously closely related to uh for example Danish, German and Dutch but not to for example Welsh.

[00:03:16]Uh so Old English and Old Norse are quite close. And if you want a video about that shows a a demonstration, a one and a half, two-minute conversation between an old Norse speaker and an old English speaker, uh you can find that pretty easily on this channel. Okay.

[00:03:32]So, Cadman's hymn being our putitively earliest poem in Old English. It might, you know, you can argue about this, but but that's probably right. Earliest preserved poem. Obviously, there are other poems we don't have written down.

[00:03:45]We have lots of manuscripts of it because there's lots of manuscripts of beads ecclesiastical history. What's interesting is that much of the time when someone has copied the Latin text of beads ecclesiastical history, the text of this old English poem is written in the margins by somebody else.

[00:04:05]It's almost as if someone were reading a text that said, "And then, uh, how can I reach these kids?" uh Taylor Swift uh composed Shake It Off and then just moves on to the next next subject, but somebody is reading this and says, "No, that uh that that that slapth I need to record the lyrics and, you know, writes the lyrics to shake it off in the margin or something like that." One thing that's really interesting about the text, this this newly uh publicized text from from Rome, is that it actually has the text of the old English poem right there in the main text of B. So that's kind of special.

[00:04:49]And the fact that it's so early is special means there's been less time for u corruptions of the text to creep in.

[00:04:57]And there are five major variants of Cadman's hymn. Because there's so many different manuscripts, you can create a stemma. Actually, the scholarly article about this, which is linked in the pin comment, has an excellent uh breakdown about this. And this particular manuscript text of Cadman's hymn is a member of a a a variant of this text that previously only three manuscript texts had. So, that's kind of cool. This gives us another window into that. And I actually suggest this may be an older uh variation of the poem than had previously been believed because this text produced in the early 800s is clearly not produced in England because there's a confusion in it between the old English letter when which is based on a rune and the Roman letter P. So, if you don't know Old English, you might actually think that letter is a P. And it looks like the scribe of this manuscript did. So, it's not copied in England, but it has variations too that must have come from the English language developing over a century or so. So, this looks like actually a really early copy from the continent somewhere of a really early copy from England somewhere of a really early uh either oral or written version of this poem. and it's in the native dialect of Cadman, North Umbrean English. So, it's very valuable, but it's not the earliest text of Cabin Sim. It is uh suggested by the authors of the article to be the third earliest, but still very cool. Uh you know, old Norse guys can be jealous of old English guys sometimes for having so many copies of some things.

[00:06:38]Okay, so what does the text say?

[00:06:41]because there has been confusion in the manuscript between that win, that W letter and a P. And because obviously someone writing for, you know, a news outlet doesn't necessarily know Old English either and doesn't know that those letters are not P's, they're W's.

[00:06:57]Uh, this text has been copied from the scholarly article into, for example, AP News and really, really misrepresents what this would sound like. So, I'm going to give you a slightly normalized.

[00:07:10]I'm going to convert wins to W's and make a couple other spelling changes that represent just sort of papering over a couple copying mistakes. And I'm going to read this to you in Old English and then I'm going to give you a offthe cuff translation. Keep in mind, I'm not a native speaker of Old English. Uh, obviously I'm a native speaker of Clint Eastwood's dialect of Old Norse, so you're going to hear a little bit of that accent here, but I don't think old English people would take too much issue with how I pronounce it.

[00:07:49]and his mode. Thunk work.

[00:08:17]Now we shall honor the guard of the heavenly kingdom, the might of the fate determiner of God and his mind considerations, his thought, the work of the father of wonders as he or possibly the lord of wonders if that's that f's father word just occurred to me as he established the origin of each of wonders. that eternal Lord first he shaped for the children of earth that's us we get a shout out uh heaven holy heaven as a roof the maker then the guardian of mankind he shaped no he gave midgard midumiard this is the word that's going to become middle earth and toolken's interpretation in legendarium that eternal Lord. He granted it to men on earth, that almighty Lord.

[00:09:24]All right. Well, that's kind of, like I said, off the cuff, but I don't think anybody would quibble too much with my presentation there. So, this is cool.

[00:09:32]It's an important interesting discovery, but uh too many new sources are reporting those W's as P's. And uh too many new sources are reporting this as something that it isn't, which is like a big, you know, first discovery of a first poem in Old English or something like that or the first addestation of it. It's not, but it's still really, really neat.

[00:09:58]Now, while I'm talking to you about Old English and Old Norse stuff, got to mention if you're wondering where would an Old Norse guy tell me to get my Viking swag, I would tell you to go to Grimfrost. Those guys are great. They carry my books. They carry uh lots of stuff with runic inscriptions that I did. So, you can tell they're actually uh accurate runic transliterations, and they're really nice. They will eat US tariffs and import taxes as of May 2026.

[00:10:26]I also got a mission for I'm filming this. Uh they don't know that I'm filming here because I just sort of ran over here this morning when I saw it.

[00:10:32]This was in the news. This is the rock garden. Uh if you need stone in northern Colorado or southern Wyoming, you should come here. Also, if you want to support this channel and my efforts to get good information about historical languages out there, it's patreon.com/norse by southwest. And I am a translator of Old Norris. Recently, my translation of the Portica has been published in a second revised and expanded translation. So, check that out for the original medieval stories of the Norse gods and heroes.

[00:11:03]And for now from beautiful Colorado, I'm wishing you all the