A manuscript containing a text of the first known poem written in the English language has been discovered in Rome by researchers from Trinity College Dublin.
The nine-line poem, Caedmon’s Hymn, dates from the late seventh century and is the oldest known poem in the English language, which was highly Germanic before the Norman Conquest of 1066.
The discovery was made following the digitisation in the National Central Library of Rome of a rare and original copy of the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People.
The text is highly significant because the Latin manuscript contains the poem in Old English in the main body of the text.
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Bede, an English monk, author and scholar, was one of the best known writers of the Early Middle Ages.
Caedmon’s Hymn praises God for the creation of the world. It is said to have been composed by an illiterate cowherd from Whitby, north Yorkshire, after a divine visitation.
The two older copies in Cambridge and St Petersburg have the poem in Latin, with the Old English text only added in the margin or at end.
The inclusion of the poem in Old English in the Rome manuscript indicates how Old English poetry was valued by Bede’s readers, according to researchers from Trinity’s School of English.
The Ecclesiastical History of the English People is an eighth century history of England written in Latin by Bede.
The manuscript was discovered by Elisabetta Magnanti and Mark Faulkner from Trinity’s School of English, who are both experts in medieval manuscripts.
Details of their discovery were published this week by Cambridge University Press in the open-access journal Early Medieval England and its Neighbours.
“I came across conflicting references to Bede’s History in Rome, some pointing to its existence and some indicating it was lost,” said Magnanti.
“When its existence was confirmed by the library and the manuscript was digitised for us, we were extremely excited to find that the manuscript contained the Old English version of Caedmon’s Hymn and that it was embedded in the Latin text.”
She said the “magic of digitisation” has allowed two researchers in Ireland to “recognise the significance of a manuscript now in Rome, containing a poem miraculously composed in northern England by a shy cowherd a millennium and a half ago”.
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“This discovery is a testament to the power of libraries to facilitate new research by digitising their collections and making them freely available online,” she said.
“About three million words of Old English survive in total, but the vast majority of texts come from the 10th and 11th centuries,” said Faulkner.
“Caedmon’s Hymn is almost unique as a survival from the seventh century; it connects us to the earliest stages of written English. As the oldest known poem in Old English it is today celebrated as the beginning of English literature.”
According to the researchers, the manuscript endured a torrid history; it was stolen from the church of San Bernardo alle Terme in Rome, where, with other manuscripts, it had been sent for safekeeping amid the Napoleonic Wars in the 1810s.
Then it changed hands privately a number of times before being acquired by the National Central Library of Rome.
Its complex ownership history meant the manuscript had been regarded as lost by Bede scholars since 1975 and no one realised it contained a copy of Caedmon’s Hymn until the National Central Library of Rome digitised the manuscript.
