More Good Words: The Literature Blog

Having reviewed all the old texts and all the translations I can find, it seems to me that the history of the dissemination of this hymn reveals both they typical path of mishearing and misunderstanding that any oral text will suffer (without that I can see any overt attempt to bend it to a new purpose) as well as, in this particular case, an attempt to reconstruct a meaning as effect of Caedmon's particularly odd use of "Midden-geard." In brief, my guess is that the poem was, in the original, must simpler than later rehearsings imagined. The structural paraphrase would be: Time to praise God almighty who made for men first heaven for  a roof, then the middle area, and then the firm ground.  But since "midden-geard" was generally understood as the earth, as the "firnum folden" between Heaven/sky and Hell/underground, Cademon's use of the term for the stuff between the ground and the roof was baffling. And this is what led to all sorts of variations...

Mr. Head awakened to discover that the room was full of moonlight. He sat up and stared at the floor boards—the color of silver—and then at the ticking on his pillow, which might have been brocade, and after a second, he saw half of the moon five feet away in his shaving mirror, paused as if it were waiting for his permission to enter. It rolled forward and cast a dignifying light on everything. The straight chair against the wall looked stiff and attentive as if it were awaiting an order and Mr. Heads trousers, hanging to the back of it, had an almost noble air, like the garment some great man had just flung to his servant; but the face on the moon was a grave one. It gazed across the room and out the window where it floated over the horse stall and appeared to contemplate itself with the look of a young man who sees his old age before him. Mr. Head could have said to it that age was a choice blessing and that only with years does a man enter into that calm understanding of lif...

1 Up from the skeleton stone walls, up from the rotting floor boards and the solid hand-hewn beams of oak of the pre-war cotton factory, dusk came. Up from the dusk the full moon came. Glowing like a fired pine-knot, it illumined the great door and soft showered the Negro shanties aligned along the single street of factory town. The full moon in the great door was an omen. Negro women improvised songs against its spell. Louisa sang as she came over the crest of the hill from the white folks' kitchen. Her skin was the color of oak leaves on young trees in fall. Her breasts, firm and up-pointed like ripe acorns. And her singing had the low murmur of winds in fig trees. Bob Stone, younger son of the people she worked for, loved her. By the way the world reckons things, he had won her. By measure of that warm glow which came into her mind at thought of him, he had won her. Tom Burwell, whom the whole town called Big Boy, also loved her. But working in the fields all day, and far away f...