The Modern Day Scop

In my last post, I retold the story of Caedmon, the oldest English poet whose work we still have. This is his poem, called "Caedmon's Hymn," recorded for us in the Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People.

When I teach "Caedmon's Hymn," after I have told his story, I emphasize to students that they are about to receive the oldest English poem that we know of. I pass around a handout (a pitiful form for content so lofty: I need illuminated vellum, bound in carved oak, with leather straps and a metal lock).¹ It has the Old English and a modern English translation side by side:

Nu sculon herigean / heofonrices Weard
Meotodes meahte / and his modgeþanc
weorc Wuldor-Fæder / swa he wundra gehwæs
ece Drihten / or onstealde
He ærest sceop / ielda bearnum
heofon to hrofe / halig Scyppend
ða middangeard / moncynnes Weard
ece Drihten / æfter teode
firum foldan / Frea ælmihtig.

And in modern English:

Now must we praise / heaven-kingdom's Guardian,
the Measurer's might / and his mind-plans,
the work of the Glory-Father, / as he for each of the wonders,
eternal Lord, / the beginning established.
He first created / for the sons of men
heaven as a roof, / holy Creator;
then middle-earth / mankind's Guardian,
the eternal Lord, / afterwards made --
solid ground for men, / Master almighty.²

Of course the natural question that someone always asks is how this counts as English at all. So after hearing it read, the first activity is a short game where students team up to find Old English words that look close enough to some modern English word that they can guess what they mean. Once they get that f is pronounced as v and g is pronounced as y, they usually find about 12.

I give some notes about Old English versification, but ultimately I want to lead them back into the poem with this discovery: Find, I tell them, the very middle word of this poem.

The middle line, which has 4 lines above it and 4 lines below it, is this:

He ærest sceop / ielda bearnum

And the middle word of that line is this:

He ærest sceop / ielda bearnum

And what does the word sceop mean? As a verb it means created. As a noun, it is the Old English word for the bard, the singer, the storyteller, the poet.

At the heart of the oldest English poem we know of is this word that speaks both to God's act of poetic creation -- his chanting a world into existence -- and to our own acts of creation. For the poet is, of course, a creator. He crafts a world with his words, and offers it to an audience to enter, to explore, to delight in, to build upon. This is the idea J. R. R. Tolkien, himself a scholar of Old English, has in mind when he writes about "subcreation." "We make in our measure and in our derivative mode," Tolkien said, "because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image of a Maker."³

While this is true in a special sense of the poet, it is true in some sense for all vocations. Dallas Willard wrote, "All legitimate work is devoted to the creation of value, of what is good to a lesser or greater degree. That was God’s plan. He not only creates; he creates creators -- you and me."⁴ As a literature teacher, I create worlds in my classroom -- both the kind that last for 60 minutes as we finish Beowulf around the dying embers of our campfire and the kind that last a semester with this particular group of students and the culture we develop. The builder and tradesman create a world; the homemaker creates a world; the financial adviser creates worlds. I once had a young man tell the class, with a bit of a defensive edge in his voice, that what he really wanted to do with his life was open up a barbecue joint. That's not at all a foolish endeavor on which his education would be wasted, because he too would be creating a world. And whether it's the fast, plastic, impersonal world of an Arby's or a rooted place that becomes a staple of the community where people gather for soul food and fellowship matters a great deal.

I have been working on this post for several days and just happened to finish it on Labor Day, but it seems perfectly appropriate to this occasion. On this day, our daily labor is often spoken of in terms of wages and conditions and the GDP. I don't think those things are unimportant, but they're certainly not of the first importance. Thinking of our work that way -- seeing ourselves as homo economicus earning wages to buy goods and services -- encourages intense short-sightedness (and, not incidentally, consumerism). We would approach our vocations differently if we understood that all of us participate in creating the world our children and grandchildren will inhabit.

(And speaking of creating a world worth passing on, I really must ask some of my artistic students to create an illuminated copy of this poem for me, on vellum and affixed to a slab of carved oak.)

---

1: Image Credit: P. C. Hodgell
2: Sadly, I have forgotten from where I lifted this modern English translation. Maybe the Norton Anthology?
3: J. R. R. Tolkien, "On Fairy Stories"
4: Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today