Indeed, one scholar has argued that Bede perceived it as a continuation of Germanic praise poetry, which led him to include a Latin translation but not the original poem.
These manuscripts show significant variation in the form of the text, making it an important case-study for the scribal transmission of Old English verse.
[3] Cædmon's Hymn survives in Old English in twenty-one manuscripts, originally as marginal annotations to Bede's Latin account of the poem.
[4][5] The following Old English text is a normalized reading of the oldest or second-oldest manuscript of the poem, the mid-eighth-century Northumbrian Moore Bede (Cambridge, University Library, MS Kk.
Thā middungeard moncynnæs Uard, eci Dryctin, æfter tīadæ fīrum foldu, Frēa allmectig.
[6] Now [we] shall honour / heaven-kingdom's guardian, the measurer's might / and his mind's plan, the work of the father of glory[a] / as he of each wonder, eternal lord, / the origin established;[b] he first created[c] / for the children of men[d] heaven for a roof, / holy creator.
Although the different Old English versions do not diverge from one another enormously, they vary enough that researchers have been able to reconstruct five substantively different variants of the poem, witnessed by different groups of the twenty-one manuscripts.
[7]: §5.1 The following list links to critical editions of each by Daniel O'Donnell:[7] One example of an attempted literary translation of Cædmon's Hymn (in this case of the eorðan recension) is Harvey Shapiro's 2011 rendering:[8] Cædmon's Hymn survives only in manuscripts of Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, which recounts the poem as part of an elaborate miracle-story.
[7]: §2 [11][12] According to Bede, Cædmon was an illiterate cow-herder employed at the monastery of Whitby who miraculously recited a Christian song of praise in Old English verse.
The following Latin text is the prose paraphrase of Cædmon's poem which Bede presents in his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum; Bede did not give the text in Old English:"Nunc laudare debemus auctorem regni caelestis, potentiam creatoris, et consilium illius facta Patris gloriae: quomodo ille, cum sit aeternus Deus, omnium miraculorum auctor exstitit; qui primo filiis hominum caelum pro culmine tecti dehinc terram custos humani generis omnipotens creavit."
Hic est sensus, non autem orde ipse uerborum, quae dormiens ille canebat; neque enim possunt carmina, quamuis optime conposita, ex alia in aliam linguam ad uerbum sine detrimento sui decoris ac dignitatis transferri.
243; Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 43; and Winchester, Cathedral I) the poem was copied by scribes working a quarter-century or more after the main text was first set down.
[21][22][23]: 382–84 Notwithstanding Bede's praise of Cædmon's Hymn in his Historia ecclesiastica, modern critics have not generally regarded the poem as a great aesthetic success.
Cædmon's work "had a newness that it lost in the course of time", but it has been asserted by many that his poetic innovations "entitle him to be reckoned a genius"; inasmuch as the content of the hymn might strike us as conventional or "banal", according to Malone (1961), "we are led astray by our knowledge of later poetry".