linguistic:translation, stylistic:style_transfer, linguistic:voice_change, information:highlighting
Cædmon's Hymn is a short Old English poem attributed to Cædmon, a supposedly illiterate and unmusical cow-herder who was, according to the Northumbrian monk Bede, miraculously empowered to sing in honour of God the Creator. The poem is Cædmon's only known composition. The poem has a claim to being the oldest surviving English poem: if Bede's account is correct, the poem was composed between 658 and 680, in the early stages of the Christianization of Anglo-Saxon England; even on the basis of the surviving manuscripts, the poem is the earliest securely dateable example of Old English verse. Correspondingly, it is one of the oldest surviving samples of Germanic alliterative verse, constituting a prominent landmark for the study of Old English literature and for the early use of traditional poetic form for Christian themes following the conversion of early medieval England to Christianity. Indeed, one scholar has argued that Bede perceived it as a continuation of Germanic praise poetry, which led him to include a Latin translation but not the original poem. The poem is also the Old E Whether due to change in oral tradition or scribal transmission, the text varies in different manuscripts. There is some debate as to the best translation of some of these variants. The following Old English text is a normalized reading of the oldest or second-oldest manuscript of the poem, the mid-eighth-century Northumbrian Moore Bede. The translation notes key points of debate as to meaning, and variation in other manuscripts. Although the different Old English versions do not diverge from one another enormously, they vary enough that researchers have been able to reconstruct five substantively different variants of the poem, witnessed by different groups of the twenty-one manuscripts. The following list links to critical editions of each by Daniel O'Donnell:
  - A Northumbrian recension characterised by the word aelda in line 5b.
  - A Northumbrian recension characterised by the word eordu in line 5b.
  - A West-Saxon recension characterised by the word ylda in line 5b.
  - A West-Saxon recension characterised by the word eorðan in line 5b.
  - A late, West-Saxon recension characterised by the word eorðe in line 5b and extensive textual corruption. One example of an attempted literary translation of Cædmon's Hymn is Harvey Shapiro's 2011 rendering:
  - Guardian of heaven     whom we come to praise
  - who mapped creation     in His thought's sinews
  - Glory-Father     who worked out each wonder
  - began with broad earth     a gift for His children
  - first roofed it with heaven     the Holy Shaper
  - established it forever     as in the beginning
  - called it middle kingdom     fenced it with angels
  - created a habitation     for man to praise His splendor