heaven – an error which the author of the Old English Genesis avoids, though (according to the existing text) he confounds the names of Enoch and Enos. Such external evidence as exists bearing on the origin of the Heliand and the companion poem is contained in a Latin document printed by Flacius Illyricus in 1562. This is in two parts; the one in prose, entitled (perhaps only by Flacius himself) Praefatio ad librum antiquum in lingua Saxonica conscriptum ; the other in verse, headed Versus de poeta et Interpreta hujus codicis. The Praefatio begins by stating that the emperor Ludwig the Pious, desirous that his subjects should possess the word of God in their own tongue, commanded a certain Saxon, who was esteemed among his countrymen as an eminent poet, to translate poetically into the German language the Old and New Testaments. The poet willingly obeyed, all the more because he had previously received a divine command to undertake the task. He rendered into verse all the most important parts of the Bible with admirable skill, dividing his work into vitteas, a term which, the writer says, may be rendered by lectiones or sententias. The Praefatio goes on to say that it was reported that the poet, till then knowing nothing of the art of poetry, had been admonished in a dream to turn into verse the precepts of the divine law, which he did with so much skill that his work surpasses in beauty all other German poetry (Ut cuncta Theudisca poemata suo vincat decore). The Versus practically reproduce in outline Bede's account of Caedmon's dream, without mentioning the dream, but describing the poet as a herdsman, and adding that his poems, beginning with the creation, relate the history of the five ages of the world down to the coming of Christ. Controversies Authorship The suspicion of some earlier scholars that the Praefatio and the Versus might be a modern forgery is refuted by the occurrence of the word vitteas, which is the Old Saxon fihtea, corresponding to the Old English fitt, which means a canto of a poem. It is impossible that a scholar of the 16th century could have been acquainted with this word, and internal evidence shows clearly that both the prose and the verse are of early origin. The Versus, considered in themselves, might very well be supposed to relate to Caedmon; but the mention