Early Medieval Heroic Epic

For centuries after the fall of Rome, the Christian Church remained the near-exclusive custodian of literacy in western Europe, and the earliest vernacular and Latin writing grew directly out of its needs: recording the lives of saints and versifying scripture for a largely oral culture. The Venerable Bede, an English monk, preserved in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731) the story of Caedmon, an illiterate herdsman who, according to Bede, received the gift of religious song in a vision; the nine surviving lines of Caedmon's Hymn, composed sometime between about 658 and 680, are usually cited as the oldest datable poem in English. Cynewulf, identified only through runic signatures woven into poems such as Elene and Juliana, likewise turned saints' lives into Old English verse. Hagiography flourished as a genre in its own right, from translations of Athanasius's Life of Saint Antony to Ælfric of Eynsham's vernacular Lives of Saints around the 990s, works meant as much for instruction and devotion as for storytelling.