The Old English poem tells us no more about Cædmon’s initial production than does Bede’s Latin paraphrase: although Bede makes it clear in his chapter that Cædmon composed additional verses for his Hymn the morning after his dream, this extra material is preserved in no vernacular text of the poem, all recensions of which stop, as does Bede’s paraphrase, at the last line of his dream-inspired first performance ( Dumville 1981, 148 Kiernan 1990a, 162).

§ B.2 In its modern form, the argument against the priority of the vernacular text rests on two main observations: 46 Fulk 1992, 427-428), there currently appears to be no solid consensus about the relationship between the Old English Hymn and Latin paraphrase (see, for example, the carefully agnostic position taken in Orchard 1996, 412-413). Despite responses from Biggs and Fulk ( Biggs 1997, 307, n. After a century of consensus concerning the vernacular Hymn’s likely priority, the debate was revived again in the early 1980s and 1990s by Dumville, Kiernan, and Isaac ( Dumville 1981, 148 Kiernan 1990a Isaac 1997). The question was explored in greater detail in an often-cited exchange among Wülker, Zupitza, and ten Brink, in which Wülker ultimately conceded Zupitza’s and Ten Brink’s argument ( Wülker 1876 Zupitza 1878 Ten Brink 1883, 372-374 Wülker 1885, 119-120). Passing references to the possibility that the Old English Hymn might be a back-translation from Bede appear in the work of several early and mid nineteenth-century scholars, beginning with Lingard in 1810 (see Lingard 1841, 316 also Schmid 1827, 336 Thorpe 1832, ix Pauli 1851, 233). § B.1 The account of the Hymn’s filiation in Chapter 5: Filiation and transmission above, assuming it is correct, provides important evidence against claims that the Old English text of the Hymn was translated from Bede’s Latin paraphrase.

Bede's account of the poet caedmon