Even to this day we ourselves dream grotesque adventures; but in the days of monachism visions were not merely a mere vivid and lengthened dream, a slight delirium, for they usually announced something important. A dream was a prognostic or a prelude. The garrulous chroniclers, and saintly Bede himself, that primeval gossiper, afford abundant evidence of such secret revelations. Whenever some great act was designed, or some awful secret was to be divulged, a dream announced it to the world. Was a king to be converted to Christianity, the people were enlightened by the vision which the sovereign revealed to them; was a maiden to take the vow of virginity, or a monastery to be built, an angelical vision hovered, and sometimes specified the very spot. Was a crime of blood to be divulged by some penitent accessory, somebody had a dream, and the criminal has stood convicted by the grave-side, which gave up the fatal witness in his victim. In those ages of simplicity and pious frauds, a dream was an admirable expedient by which important events were carried on, and mystification satisfactorily explained the incomprehensible.
The marvellous incident on which the history of Cædmon revolves may only veil a fact which has nothing extraordinary in itself when freed from the invention which disguises it. Legends like the present one were often borrowed by one monastery from another, and an exact counterpart of the dream and history of our Saxon bard, in a similar personage and a like result, has been pointed out as occurring in Gaul. A vernacular or popular version of the Scriptures being required, it was supplied by a _peasant wholly ignorant of the poetic art till he had been instructed in a_ DREAM.[1]
Scriptural themes were common with the poets of the monastery.[2] The present enterprise, judging from the variety of its fragments from both Testaments and from the Apocrypha, in its complete state would have formed a chronological poem of the main incidents of the Scriptures in the vernacular Saxon. This was a burden of magnitude which no single shoulder could have steadily carried, and probably was supported by several besides "the Dreamer." Critical Saxonists, indeed, have detected a variation in the style, and great inequalities in the work; such discordances indicate that the paraphrase was occasionally resumed by some successor, as idling monks at a later period were often the continuators of voluminous romances. I would class the Cædmonian poem among the many attempts of the monachal genius to familiarize the people with the miraculous and the religious narratives in the Scriptures, by a paraphrase in the vernacular idiom. The poem may be deemed as equivocal as the poet; the text has been impeached; interpolations and omissions are acknowledged by the learned in Saxon lore. The poem is said to have been written in the seventh century, and the earliest manuscript we possess is of the tenth, suffering in that course of time all the corruptions or variations of the scribes, while the ruder northern dialect has been changed into the more polished southern. If we may confide in a learned conjecture, it may happen that Cædmon is no name at all, but merely a word or a phrase; and thus the entity of the Dreamer of the Monastery of Whitby may vanish in the wind of two Chaldaic syllables![3] Be this as it may, for us the poem is an entity, whatever becomes of the pretended Dreamer.