F. P. Magoun

Bede's Story of Cædman: The Case History of an Anglo-Saxon Oral Singer

IN Book IV, ch. 22 (24) of his Historia Ecelesiastica Gentis Anglorum, completed in A.D. 731, Bede, monk of Saint Pauls monastery, Jarrow, County Durham, tells the story of an unlettered farmhand, Caedman by name, who in an unexpected fashion, reportedly supernatural, developped the art of orally composing narrative verse on Biblical-Christian subjects. Caedman, composing his songs some fifty ears before Bede was writing, was an employee on the monastic estate at Stretnas-halc, today Whitby, about fifty miles south of Jarrow on the Yorkshire coast.2 This chapter in Bede is of peculiar interest to students of oral poetry,3 as well as to those of Anglo-Saxon literature, in that it furnishes an account, a casehistory indeed, of certain parts of the career of an oral singer of the past. It is the only such account known to me that goes back substantially earlier than the memory of living men. The chapter in question follows on, and is closely connected with, an encomiastic appraisal (ch. 21 [23]) of the rule of Hild (659-680), builder and abbess of the Whitby foundation. Only the first two-thirds of the chapter, devoted to Caedman as a singer of tales, is translated here; the rest has to do with his death and is irrelevant o the matter in hand.

On Some Survivals of Pagan Belief in Anglo-Saxon England

Thanks to the considerable surviving corpus of Old-Norse literature much is known about Old North-Germanic religious practices and beliefs; by comparison, our knowledge of corresponding matters in the West-Germanic area is meager. For England, historically and sociologically an offshoot of, and by the time of the earliest written records long separated from, the north-west German homeland, our best source of information is a rather miscellaneous collection of charms. Next probably come the epic poem Beowulf and the historian Bede, who especially in his Historia ecclesiastica passim furnishes some additional information. Otherwise one is dependent upon scattered materials, ranging from single words to such cult objects as the cenotaph ship excavated in 1939 at Sutton Hoo in Norfolk. In the face of this relative paucity of knowledge any little additional information may be welcome.

The Rome of Two Northern Pilgrims: Archbishop Sigeric of Canterbury and Abbot Nikolás of Munkathverá

The pilgrim-diaries associated with Sigeric, archbishop of Canterbury (990–994), and Nikolas, abbot of the Benedictine monastery at Munkaþvera, Iceland (1155–1159), commend themselves to historians of ecclesiastical Rome on more than one count. Both diaries include itineraries unusually detailed for their periods and in this regard are unique for the countries of origin and valuable in regard to the history of the regions traversed. More than this, and of particular moment for the historian of the medieval Church, both diaries devote considerable attention to sights seen in the Eternal City. Here these little works offer a welcome, in a sense intimate, view of Rome of the periods in question; for they tell us one very important thing that the medieval Baedekers do not, namely, just what two individuals elected to see or were shown or, equally significant, what two men chose to note down or especially remembered in the course of their tour of the city. The English diary with its systematic list of Roman churches — the titles often in a dubious Latin (see the individual items, especially pp. 275–276 below) — furnishes us, furthermore, with a little catalogue that, coming between the list of Leo III (806) and the list that the papal chamberlain Cencio Savelli (later Pope Honorius III) compiled in 1192, fills an obvious gap. The Icelandic diary, though less important in this regard, gains in interest by including a number of secular monuments and considerable detail about the churches, wanting in the English work. Both texts are worthy of more study than has been devoted to them.

Aldhelm's Diocese of Sherborne Bewestan Wuda

On the death of Haedde, bishop of the West-Saxons (676–705) with his see at Winchester (Ha), the West-Saxon diocese as then constituted was subdivided; in Freemans words this was “the great ecclesiastical event of the reign of Ine,” king of Wessex from 688 to 726. The simplest, earliest and really most authoritative statement of the matter in general is that of Bede: Quo [Haeddi] defuncto, episcopatus prouinciae illius [Occidentalium Saxonum] in duas parrochias divisus est. Una data Daniheli,…altera Aldhelmo.

Kronika O Alexandru Velikém: A Czech Prose Translation of the Historia de Preliis, Recension J

At S is now generally understood, the Natiuitas et Victoria Alexandri,1 a mid-tenth-century t anslation into Latin by a Neapolitan Archpresbyter, Leo, from a (lost) so-called 8-group MS. of the Greek Pseudo-Callisthenes,2 thrice underwent expansion and elaboration. These expanded versions of Leos work pass commonly under the generic title Historia de Preliis and exist in three main recensions: J1, the earliest, was twice independently reworked, yielding recensions J23 and J3 (ante 1150); J3a (ca. 1150) designates a recently discovered derivative of J3, apparently local to England.4 The J3 recension is of special interest to bibliophiles since, in an abbreviated form, it was utilized for most of the famous Historia de Preljis incunabula, notably those printed at Strassburg.o Although Latin texts of recensions J1 and J2 have already been edited,6 we