In the medieval Golden Legend there is a story which purports to explain why the historian Bede is known as ‘the Venerable’, rather than a more common title like ‘Saint’. It claims that after Bede’s death a cleric tried to compose a Latin epitaph for his tomb, but ran into writer’s block. He came up with ‘Hac sunt in fossa Bedae sancti ossa’ (‘Here in this grave are the bones of St Bede’). Unfortunately these lines didn’t scan properly, and he could not work out how to express them better. Frustrated, he gave up and went to bed.
Next morning, he returned to the tomb and found a mysterious writer had solved his problem. In place of ‘sancti’, an unseen hand had engraved another word: ‘venerabilis’. This fit the metre to his satisfaction, completing the poem. The cleric took this to be the work of an angel, and it supposedly provided heavenly authority to justify Bede’s unusual title.
This is not the only medieval tale about poetry completed through non-human intervention. It bears comparison to Bede’s own story of the cowherd Cædmon, embarrassed by his lack of poetic skill, who learned poetry overnight when an apparition taught him to sing ‘in words he had never heard before’. Another parallel occurs in an Icelandic saga, which tells of a shepherd, Hallbjörn, who wanted to compose a verse in memory of the respected poet Thorleifr jarlsskáld. He managed one line, but could get no further. When he fell asleep on the poet’s burial-mound, Thorleifr himself appeared in a dream, finishing the verse and giving him advice on writing poetry. Like the angel who fixed the cleric’s bad Latin, Thorleifr’s instruction prioritised technical accuracy in poetic metre. As the scholar Gabriel Turville-Petre commented of these stories, in this respect ‘it is sad to think how little the taste of Other World poets has in common with our own’.
All three experiences are born of frustration. These aspiring poets want to create, but need help from outside themselves to bridge the gap between desire and performance. Today, that kind of writer’s block is becoming a thing of the past. Any would-be writer or student struggling for inspiration has a new form of non-human intelligence offering to help them: instead of waiting for supernatural aid, you can just ask ChatGPT. It will write you a Latin epitaph, or anything else you want, as swiftly as any dream.
Perhaps it’s unfair to compare the poetic inspiration of Cædmon and Hallbjörn to AI. Their visions are transformative experiences, initiations into a new career. After their first supernatural encounter they go on to practise, improve, and succeed as poets through their own efforts; their otherworldly teachers produce one poem to get them started, but don’t do the hard work for them.
The cleric feels rather lazy by comparison. His angel-written verse is not divine inspiration, just a shortcut which finishes his work for him. (And not very well: it is, let’s be honest, a pretty weak epitaph). That’s partly why his story feels reminiscent of AI, which offers such tempting, but often illusionary, alternatives to struggling through the work of thinking and writing. As more AI tools push to read articles for you or generate text on demand, it is increasingly a conscious choice to insist on reading, writing, and thinking for yourself.
More, there’s an odd parallel between the authority medieval texts ascribe to the angel-generated epitaph and the deferential nature of much current discourse about AI. Although presumably no one really believes AI has supernatural abilities, some people certainly talk as if it does. There is an unexamined assumption that work produced by AI must be better than what a human mind is capable of, and an unwillingness to assess how far this is actually true. People on social media use AI bots to fact-check human experts, outsourcing their own ability to research whether something is accurate, apparently without stopping to consider if the bot itself is reliable.
At least medieval believers had some reason for assuming that if an angel wrote your poem for you, it must be superior to what you could come up with yourself, more eloquent and more trustworthy. Many people seem to attach the same authority to AI-generated writing, even if what it’s producing is blandly impersonal or undermined by errors. We need to think more critically about how we evaluate this new source of authority, or all writing may start to sound like the cleric’s epitaph – superficially competent, but distinctly uninspired.
Eleanor Parker is Lecturer in Medieval English Literature at Brasenose College, Oxford.
