'A Little Bird Told Me': Imagining the Interim in Ædiluulf’s Carmen de abbatibus

The Carmen de abbatibus (DA) is an early ninth-century Latin poem of about 800 lines penned by the elusive Ædiluulf, in all likelihood a monk of Northumbrian origin or, at least, training.The poem celebrates the accomplishments of seven abbots and other holy men of an unnamed monastic cella, but this historical element is complemented with a striking eschatological and visionary dimension. This paper will focus on three otherworldly visions embedded in the poem, one experienced by a certain Merchdeof (§ xi, lines 321–394) and the other two by the poet himself (§§ xxi and xxii, lines 656–795). In spite of their obviously derivative character, Ædiluulf’s visions strike a somewhat dissonant chord, in that they focus on the bliss of the righteous souls and on the pleasant regions they inhabit, rather than on the gory descriptions of hell and of the torments inflicted on the damned. Also, Ædiluulf is highly idiosyncratic with regard to the interim state between the individual post mortem and the last, universal Judgement, in that he explicitly states what had generally been left implicit, namely that an individual trial takes place immediately after death (lines 337–338). Finally, DA is scattered with various afterlife anecdotes featuring heavenly intermediaries or psychopomps in bird form reminiscent of a common feature of early Insular eschatological and visionary literature, that is birds as manifestations of the souls of the departed, as well as of angels. Thus, Ædiluulf’s visions afford distinctive elaborations on the elusive concept of the interim paradise, as well as on the motif of the souls or angels in bird-form, contributing some meaningful insights into characteristic elements of the early Insular cosmology and eschatology.