> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://theparnassian.com/en/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Now let us praise the all-ruling keeper of heaven, the Lord's almighty power, his good and wise counsel, and the creation of the giver of glory, how he, the eternal sovereign, gave a beginning to every wonder
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/nyne-vosslavoslovim-vsevlastnogo-neboderzhtsa-gospoda-vsemogushchestvo-blagoe-premudromyslie-i-sozdane-slavopodatelia-kak-on-gosudar-predvechnyi-vsiakomu-chudu-dal-nachalo/
- Published: 2026-04-29T13:39:20.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T09:11:17.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Archive, Faith, Books, Science, Rome, Saint Petersburg

*Now let us praise* 
*the all-ruling keeper of heaven,* 
*the Lord's almighty power,* 
*his good and wise counsel* 
*and the creation of the giver of glory,* 
*how he, the eternal sovereign,* 
*gave a beginning* 
*to every wonder.* 
*He made a lofty roof* 
*for the children of earth,* 
*the holy creator* 
*set up the vault of heaven;* 
*the middle world was made* 
*by the all-glorious ruler of peoples,* 
*a boundary for those born of earth,* 
*the eternal sovereign,* 
*the God of heaven,* 
*this dwelling of mortals.*

*Literal translation*

**Cædmon's Hymn, translated by Vladimir Tikhomirov**

The oldest poem in the English language is nine lines in which an illiterate shepherd praises God for making the sky a roof and the earth a floor.

Cædmon worked at the court of the monastery of Whitby in Northumbria in the 670s. According to Bede the Venerable, he could not sing and used to slip away from the table when the harp was passed around at feasts. One night an angel appeared to him and bade him compose a song about the creation of the world. In the morning Cædmon sang it to the abbess Hild. She understood that her shepherd had been granted a miraculous inspiration, and took him into the monastery. Thus English literature begins.

In his "Ecclesiastical History of the English People" Bede recorded only a Latin translation of the hymn, judging that there was no point in rendering it back into the barbarous vernacular. But the copyists decided otherwise and began to leave a record of the original poem in the margins.

Today "Cædmon's Hymn" is known from 21 manuscripts. Last week researchers from Trinity College Dublin discovered a twenty-second, in the National Central Library in Rome (first photo). The manuscript, from the early ninth century, was copied by a monk of the abbey of Nonantola in northern Italy. It is the third oldest copy after the Cambridge and Saint Petersburg ones, and the first in which the Old English text stands not in the margins but within the main block of text.

One of the two oldest copies of "Cædmon's Hymn" (second photo) is kept in the Russian National Library in Saint Petersburg. This is the so-called Saint Petersburg Bede, from a manuscript of Bede the Venerable's "Ecclesiastical History of the English People", copied at the Northumbrian monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow in the middle of the eighth century, in effect during the author's lifetime. For a thousand years the codex lay in the Parisian abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and in 1791, after the monastic library was plundered by revolutionary mobs and most of its books passed from hand to hand, the volume was acquired by the secretary of the Russian embassy in Paris, Pyotr Petrovich Dubrovsky. In 1805 Alexander I bought Dubrovsky's collection and presented it to the Imperial Public Library, where it formed the basis of Russia's first department of manuscripts.

![](https://theparnassian.com/content/images/2026/09/photo_20463@29-04-2026_16-39-20.jpg)