Cædmon was the first English writer of note who used his own Anglo-Saxon language, and the first religious poet of the Teutonic race. All that we know of him is from Bede, who devotes to him a chapter of his History (book iv. 24). He died about 680 A.D. In Bede's account, written not more than sixty years after his death, we are told that Cædmon, until he was of mature age, had never learned any poem, and that sometimes when at festivals his turn came to take the harp and sing, he would rise from the feast and go home. On one such occasion, having gone out to the stables of the beasts, which it fell to him that night to guard, and sleeping at his watch, he had a vision, in which one stood by him and said, 'Cædmon, sing me some song!' 'I cannot sing,' he said, 'for this cause I have come out hither from the feast.' 'But you shall sing to me!' 'What,' asked Cædmon, 'ought I to sing?' 'Sing the beginning of created things.' And straightway a poetic inspiration seized him, and he began to pour forth verses in praise of God, of which Bede adds, 'this is the sense, though not the order: "Now ought we to praise the author of the Heavenly Kingdom, the Creator's might and counsel, the works of the Father of Glory; how through the Eternal God he became the author of all wondrous things; Almighty Guardian, who for men's sons created first heaven for their roof, and then the earth." When he awoke from his dream, the words remained fast-rooted in his memory, and were recited by him to others with new confidence. He was taken before Hilda, abbess of Streaneshalch (now Whitby), when she and the learned men who were with her in the monastery immediately declared that he had received the gift of song from Heaven. He was now educated, became a monk, and spent the rest of his life in composing poems on the Bible histories and on miscellaneous religious subjects, a long list of which is given by Bede, who says that in all he wrote 'his care was to draw men away from the love of evil deeds, and excite them to the love of well-doing;' and that 'none of those who tried after him to make religious poems could vie with Cædmon, for he did not learn the poetic art from men, but from God.'
Of the 'Paraphrase of Cædmon' there is extant but a single MS. of the 10th century (Cod. Jun. xi.) in the Bodleian, consisting of 229 folio pages, 212 of which contain the account of the creation and the fall of the angels and of man, and the story of Genesis down to the offering of Isaac, together with a description of the Exodus of Israel, and part of the book of Daniel, ending with Belshazzar's feast; the remaining pages comprise a poem of Christ and Satan—a description of the 'Harrowing of Hell.' It is certain that this poetry, at least in its present form, is due to various authors, and probably to different times. Professor Sievers endeavoured to prove, from the identity of words and idioms, that one passage—that describing the temptation and fall of man—was a translation of an Old Saxon poem by the author of the Heliland; but it is perhaps more probable that both poems are versions of a Northumbrian original. The extant MS. was presented by Archbishop Ussher to Francis Dujon the younger, better known as Franciscus Junius, by whom it was printed for the first time at Amsterdam in 1655, twelve years before the first edition of Paradise Lost, to some parts of which it bears a striking resemblance. Satan's Speech in Hell is characterised by a simple yet solemn greatness of imagination, which may possibly have influenced in some degree the more magnificent genius of Milton. The beginning of this MS. differs considerably from the Anglo-Saxon verses given by Alfred in his translation of Bede as the opening of Cædmon's poem, as well as from the Northumbrian version appended to an 8th-century MS. of Bede in the university of Cambridge. Dr George Hickes was the first to doubt the identification of the extant paraphrase with the work of Bede's poet; the elder Disraeli in his Amenities of Literature supposes the account of Cædmon's inspiration to be a monkish fiction devised for gain; and the learned Palgrave notes with idle ingenuity (Archæologia, xxiv. 342; Lond. 1832) that as the Jews call Genesis (from its first two words) Bereshith, and the Chaldee Targum of Onkelos names it Be-Kadmin ('in the beginning'), the latter word may be the origin of the name given to the Anglo-Saxon versifier of Genesis. The fine poem known as 'The Dream of the Holy Rood,' part of which in Northumbrian is inscribed in runic letters on the Ruthwell cross, while the remainder was discovered in a MS. at Vercelli, has also been ascribed with much plausibility to Cædmon. His name is inscribed upon the topmost stone, but this may mean nothing if Cædmon was, as Mr Bradley supposes, merely an Anglicised form of a common British name, Catumanus (in modern Welsh, Cadfan). Very little was done for the study of Cædmon from Hickes's death in 1715 down to the year 1830, when the attention of English scholars was again directed to it by the Danish scholar, Grundtvig. Editions of the Paraphrase of Cædmon have been published by Benjamin Thorpe, with Eng. trans. (Lond. 1832); K. W. Bouterwek (Elberfeld and Gütersloh, 1851 and 1854); C. W. M. Grein, in his Bibliothek der angelsächsischen Poesie (Gött. 1857-64); and the part relating to Exodus and Daniel occupies vol. ii. of Harrison and Sharp's Library of Anglo-Saxon Poetry (Boston, 1883; 2d ed. 1885). See Bernhard ten Brink's History of English Literature (vol. i. 1877); Henry Morley's English Writers (vol. ii. 1888); and Henry Bradley's article in vol. viii. of the Dictionary of National Biography (1886).