Scholars from Trinity College Dublin (TCD) 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, composed in the seventh century by a Northumbrian cattle herder, was recorded by the medieval theologian Bede in the eighth century. The Old English version found in Rome is believed to have been transcribed by a monk in northern Italy between AD800 and AD830.
Elisabetta Magnanti, who discovered the manuscript with Mark Faulkner from Trinity's school of English, expressed surprise at the find. '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. It was a huge surprise, a very good one.'
The Rome copy is the third oldest surviving text of the poem, after older copies held at Cambridge and St Petersburg. Unlike those versions, which have the poem in Latin with Old English added in the margin or at the end, the Rome copy contains the Old English version in the main body of the text. Faulkner noted that this reflects the growing status of the English language in the ninth century. 'The absence of the poem would have been felt by the readers, I think, and so that’s why it goes in.'
The poem is punctuated with a full stop after every word, indicating that word spacing was a relatively new invention. Faulkner explained, 'It is part of the early development of ways of dividing words and shows text starting to come towards the presentation of English that we know today.' The researchers have published their findings in the journal Early Medieval England and its Neighbours.
Caedmon is said to have been an illiterate cattle herder at Whitby Abbey in North Yorkshire. According to Bede, he had a divine visitation that inspired him to compose the hymn, which praises God for creating the world. Bede included a Latin translation in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People but omitted the original Old English. Within a century, a monk at the abbey of Nonantola in northern Italy included the Old English version, a sign of how much early readers valued English poetry.
The discovery was made possible by the library's digitisation efforts. Andrea Cappa, head of manuscripts and rare books at the Rome library, said the institution is digitising holdings from Italy's National Centre for the Study of the Manuscript, giving researchers access to more than 40 million images. Riccardo Fangarezzi, head of archives at the abbey in Nonantola, welcomed the find, saying, 'The present times may be rather dark, yet such intellectual contributions are genuine rays of sunlight: the continent is less isolated.'
