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 seventh-century poem was composed by a Northumbrian cattle herder and recorded by the medieval theologian Bede in the eighth century.
The Old English manuscript 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 contain the poem in Latin with the Old English added in the margin.
The Rome copy is significant because it includes 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, indicating that word spacing was a relatively new invention at the time.
Elisabetta Magnanti and Mark Faulkner from Trinity's school of English made the discovery. Magnanti, an expert in medieval manuscripts, prompted the library to check its archives after encountering conflicting evidence about a copy in Rome. The library located, digitised, and emailed pages that included the poem.
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, providing access to over 40 million images. The findings have been detailed in the open-access journal Early Medieval England and its Neighbours.
