CZDMON

(c. 660), the first Eng. poet. All that we know of him is drawn from Bede, who tells us that he was a Northumbrian herdsman, who received miraculously the gift of song and wrote several poems on _ Biblical subjects, finally dying in Whitby Abbey. Of his works in their original Northumbrian dialect only the nine opening lines of a Hymn. on the Creation exist today. When ized the Old Saxons of Germany they taught them C.’s poems, whence arose the Old Saxon poem on the Heliand (or ‘Saviour’), and another on Genesis, which was trans. into West Saxon dialect of England. These two fine poems, Old Saxon Heliand, and West, or AngloS axon Genesis, give us a distant impre ion of C.’s powers; Genesis influenced Milton in his writing of Paradise Lost.