Scholars from Trinity College Dublin have discovered a lost copy of Caedmon's Hymn, the earliest surviving poem in the English language, at the National Central Library of Rome. The poem was composed in the seventh century by an illiterate Northumbrian cattle herder named Caedmon.
The Old English version found in Rome is believed to have been transcribed by a monk in northern Italy between AD800 and AD830. It is the third oldest surviving text of the poem, after older copies held at Cambridge and St Petersburg, which have the poem in Latin with Old English added in the margin or at the end.
Elisabetta Magnanti, who discovered the manuscript with Mark Faulkner, said: 'When we saw it we looked at each other and I said, No one knows about this. To make sure I wasn't dreaming I double-checked the catalogues and there was no mention of it.'
The Rome copy is significant because it contains the Old English version in the main body of the text, reflecting the language's growing status in the ninth century. The poem is punctuated with a full stop after every word, showing that word spacing was a relatively new invention.
The researchers have detailed their findings in Early Medieval England and its Neighbours, an open-access journal published by Cambridge University Press. The discovery was made possible by the library's digitisation efforts, which allowed the scholars to access the manuscript remotely.
