Anglo-Saxon Christian Poetry

Abstract

At the beginning of Old English literature we find two types of poet: Widsith, the “far-traveller”, the wandering singer of the princes’ courts, and Caedmon, the monk versifying in his narrow cell. The first of these is a wholly fictitious personage, while from the second—of whose existence Bede’s well-known account gives assurance — there is preserved only a hymn of nine verses. Yet the two figures stand forth as typical representatives of the secular and the religious poetry of the Anglo-Saxons.