Please read the web site on Cædmon’s Story in tandem with O’Keeffe’s chapter on Cædmon’s Hymn. You will notice that O’Keeffe’s analysis, along with that in her chapter on the poems of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, is very technical. You should not expect to understand all of it. What I want you to do is to try to extract the larger point behind what she is saying. See if you can put that into words for next week. You can also generate list of questions about technical terminology, the Old English language, or other aspects of O’Keeffe’s analysis.

Here are some further resources you can explore.

1. I have set up on WebCT an image database for Cædmon’s Hymn and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle poems. This contains facsimiles of every surviving manuscript copy of these poems. Although O’Keeffe reproduces some of these images, you can see the full set on the WebCT web site. To log in, go to http://webteach.csun.edu. Note that I have provided full manuscript information for Cædmon’s Hymn in the image databases, but technical problems have prevented me from doing so for the Chronicle poems. You can identify which image is which by cross-referencing the filename of the image with the listings at http://www.csun.edu/~sk36711/WWW/index.html630ML/CHimageguide.html.
2. I have provided links to the transcribed text of the Chronicle poems and translations, which you can use in tandem with the images of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

You should consult the above resources as much or as little as you want for next week’s class. Our in-class discussion is to be driven largely by your questions about and responses to O’Keeffe’s approach (and we will have access to the image database in class). If you are intrigued by O’Keeffe’s approach, Cædmon’s Hymn, or the poems of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and want to delve into this more deeply more deeply, you will have the opportunity to make use of these resources in greater detail for your web projects.