Caedmon's Call

Imagine a hall in Northumbria, thirteen hundred years ago, and the harp going round the benches after supper — and one man rising in dread and slipping out into the dark, because in his whole long life he has never been able to sing. His name is Caedmon, and tonight, in a cattle-shed, God will give him the gift he has run from his entire life. In a deliberately quieter and more intimate episode, Dcn. Seraphim reads and talks through Bede's account of the first Christian poet of the English language, movement by movement — the herdsman who became a monk of Hilda's Whitby, and whose first sacred song, like the Irish Saltair we have been reading, opens at the beginning of created things. The episode closes with a full reading of Caedmon's Hymn in the original Old English and in translation: the headwaters of every English hymn and carol that ever lifted a heart to heaven. Music used: "Across The Fields Of Gold" Yagull Music - Sasha Branislav Markovic, Mayu Saeki