Spending time with Basil

In a corner of the busy city of Newcastle upon Tyne there is a little haven of relative  calm behind the Catholic cathedral of St Mary's. A statue of a man stands staring across Neville Street, seemingly towards the Anglican cathedral of St Nicholas, just visible over the copper roof of Bolbec Hall.

The statue stands at one end of an oddly shaped pedestal of stone slabs, smoothly dressed on their upper faces but roughly chiselled around their exterior.  Behind the bronze figure, at the other end of the pedestal is a block of stone surrounded by a number of wave worn boulders. On either side of the block, which I think is of dolerite, like the boulders at its feet, are inscribed some lines of verse, one in English on a flat and polished surface, the other seemingly chiselled rudely into the weathered rock and in words unintelligible to most of those who see them.

Okay, so what of it? Why break a long blog silence to talk about a bit of public art? Is it Caedmon who is depicted here in Newcastle, far from his final home in North Yorkshire?

Sadly, no. The bronze is a much more recent figure, Cardinal Basil Hume. A native of the North East of England, he is commemorated here and the pedestal and rocks are all symbolic of the cradle of Christianity in the region, the Holy Island of Lindisfarne. 

It seems that Cardinal Hume had a particular love of Holy Island and the tale of the conversion of the English as recounted by the Venerable Bede. So, there on the slab is a modern English translation of Cadmon's Hymn of Creation, differing a little from my own, but essentially the same: 

In its favour it does try for alliteration, but it breaks the usual rules by having the alliteration occur twice in the second half line, which is the reverse of the mode in Old English poetry.

It gets better though. As you walk around to the other side of the slab there is a much rougher incised text. This time it is in Old English, employing a rather debased version of Carolingian script. I picked up a few errors but there is enough there to see the the sculptor has wisely opted to use the Northumbrian version with its characteristic use of u for the letter w rather than the West Saxon version which differs on a number of points but is noted for its use of the runic letter wynn for w.

It doesn't look like much, but if you can decipher the letters (and as I say, there are clear errors) then you feel as if you have unlocked a great secret.  

There are no real gaps between words, but here is clearly the opening words of the Hymn; Nu scylun hergon

...hefaon ricaos uard ...

... metudas maocti end ...

... his modgithanc...

... uerc uuldurfadur ...

I would like to thank those responsible for putting this odd little monument in our city, for even with its imperfections it evokes something wonderful. I do not know whether those who eat their lunch by it, pose for photos in front of it or sleep rough near it realise the gem that lies before them.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to you! I hope that 2014 will bring us all great things!

The first of those great things is my first book: Cædmon: The Lord's Poet, which I have published on CreateSpace in association with Handboc Publications. It is also available on Kindle and other formats.

To understand the book, it helps to be familiar with the historical account of Cædmon's life, which comes from Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People. For a full account (including Old English and Latin versions) see here. Bede wanted to give an account of the growing fashion for composing religious poetry in the vernacular (what we now call Old English). The style was the same as that used by the English scops who recorded the combination of fact and fiction which stood for the history of the various royal houses of Britain at the time. Christ, the patriarchs and the saints are therefore depicted as bold warriors, tackling the trials put in front of them as if they were fighting a battle against hordes of men or against monsters and devils.

The issue of Christians and Germanic poetry was a vexed one, prompting Alcuin to write later; "What has Ingeld to do with Christ?" when remonstrating with abbots who allowed profane poetry to be read in their monasteries. Bede's account of Cædmon pre-dates this problem, and can be seen as being at the beginning of the problem. Perhaps the composition of Christian poetry was seen as an excuse for the study and recording of heroic poetry as a source of inspiration for the "true work" of composing religious poems.

Perhaps Alcuin's arguments rang home, for from this early period only three Old English poems have been preserved and they are all Christian. Cædmon's poem is arguably the oldest, but as it was recorded in Latin by Bede, the Old English versions that we have access to were written much later. I have used the Northumbrian version in the book, but this is itself much later than the more familiar West Saxon version, which dates from the time of King Alfred. The other two poems are the beautiful poem recorded in the stone of the Ruthwell Cross and Bede's Death Song, which was recorded in Old English in the midst of a letter in Latin giving an account of Bede's death. We can only wish that Bede himself had thought to do the same in his account of Cædmon, instead of apologising for the poem losing something in translation.

Only after the return of literacy resulting from the measures taken by King Alfred did we really get an explosion of the recording of poetry, of which we have today only a few sad leaves. Many of the poems may have had a much longer life thanks to oral transmission, but the date of writing is usually taken as the date of composition as it is the point of writing that allows a poem such as Beowulf to gain a veneer of Christian respectability, making it the poem that we know today. Comparison of the poem on the Ruthwell Cross and the later "Dream of the Rood" show how oral transmission not only preserve poems but also it can be seen that they allowed them to change and grow.

Welcome!

Here is the beginning of the blog for Cædmon: The Lord's Poet, a book by John K. Deaconson. I can trace the origin of this book to about 1996, but as I had other things on my mind back then, it has taken a long time to reach the point when I feel ready to release it to the world. Hopefully this blog will mean that it will reach one or two people that it would otherwise pass by.

So what is The Lord's Poet all about?

In Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, he devotes a single chapter to a man called Cædmon (also written as Caedmon), who sings a short song about the creation of the world according to the Christian Bible. This is a significant moment for Bede, as it marks the beginning of a movement to use vernacular Anglo-Saxon verse forms for Christian themes.

The Lord's Poet delves into the history of the mid 7th century in Britain and finds a place for this enigmatic poet to inhabit, a place far removed from the cow byre of an estate in North Yorkshire which is the setting for the beginning of both Bede's version and mine.

Just how much of Bede's story is invention is impossible to say, but his reputation is founded on a reliance upon eye witness accounts, and he is known to have had close contact with monks from Streoneshalh (Whitby) from other stories that he told about that place. Cædmon has part of the sort of information that would make him considered a saint, but the story was incomplete in Bede's time, so for example there are no dates connected with him that would supply a feast day and crucially there are no miracles recorded surrounding this figure. He is however considered to be a saint by the Roman Catholic church (no feast day) and by the Church of England (feast day 11th February).

For me the part of Bede's story which has the most power is the account of his death, for Cædmon has a beautiful Christian death: perhaps only Bede's own death has a similar tranquil quality to it. I have therefore included an epilogue to my book which ties in with the story that I have given the younger Cædmon while keeping the serenity and sanctity that Bede's account gives to the Lord's Poet.