Holland's Influence on English Language and Literature

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Part III The Influence of the Netherlands on English Literature

Chapter XII On Caedmon

The name of Caedmon is one of the most prominent in the history of early English literature. Everybody knows the beautiful poems of old Christian England on ‘the beginning of created things’ in paraphrases on Genesis (Chap. I-XXII) extending to the story of the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham, on Exodus (Chap. II-XV), on Daniel, and the three minor poems, the first one dealing with the Fall of the Angels, the second one with Christ's Harrowing of Hell, and the third one with Christ's Temptation. ‘No one would today seriously maintain even that these poems are all by one author; it is more likely that more than one writer has had a hand in each’¹ One interpolated part, in the second version of the Fall of the Angels in the paraphrases on Genesis, has been brought into connection with the author of the Heliand.² And as the Heliand was probably written under the immediate suggestion of Ludger,³ the great Dutch missionary among the Saxons along the borderline of Holland and Germany,

1 The Cambridge History of English Literature, I, 50.

2 Sievers, Der Heliand und die Angelsachsische genesis.

3 On Ludger see the first chapters.

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we may see in the poems of Caedmon ‘a fruitful exchange of literary ideas’ between England, the Netherlands, and the western part of Germany during the first half of the ninth century.

But there is another interesting point, viz., the question how these poems of Caedmon, as they are generally called, became first a subject of study, how they were published, and became at last a subject of discussion in every textbook of English Literature. This has been as a whole the work of the well-known Dutch scholar, Franciscus Junius.¹ During his sojourn in England, Junius collected transcripts of many old English manuscripts, and in the year 1649 he got from Archbishop Ussher a copy of the manuscript containing the poems, which Junius, in consequence of the description given by Bede of a certain poet Caedmon and his poems, called the poems of Caedmon, and under that name published them in the year 1655 at Amsterdam,² so that these famous poems were first studied by a Dutchman, and were first printed in Holland.

1 On Junius, see our first chapters.

2 ‘Diese Veroffentlichung war bahnbrechend für die Entschliessung der Angelsachsischen Poesie, da mit Ausnahme eines unbedeutenden Stückes bis dahin nur prosaische Denkmahler herausgegeben waren.’ Herman Paul. Grundriss, I, 35.