ROME — A 9th-century manuscript that had gone almost entirely unexamined by scholars of the Venerable Bede for half a century has been found to contain the oldest surviving English poem, a discovery researchers at Trinity College Dublin say rewrites the early history of the English language’s reach.
Elisabetta Magnanti, a visiting research fellow at Trinity, and Mark Faulkner, an associate professor of medieval literature, located the manuscript in Rome’s National Central Library after Magnanti spent years cataloging copies of Bede’s “Ecclesiastical History of the English People.” When she received digitized images of the book, she and Faulkner were stunned to see the poem embedded within the main Latin text, not scrawled in a margin or added as an afterthought.
“We were extremely surprised. We were speechless. We couldn’t believe our eyes when we first saw that,” Magnanti said. “It was extraordinary.”
The poem, “Caedmon’s Hymn,” is a nine-line Old English hymn about Creation, composed in the 7th century by an agricultural worker named Caedmon at Whitby Abbey in North Yorkshire, according to Bede’s account. Bede, an 8th-century monk, recorded the story in his “Ecclesiastical History,” one of the most reproduced medieval texts. Faulkner considers the hymn the start of English literature.
“Embarrassed that he didn’t know anything suitable, Caedmon left the feast and went to bed,” Faulkner said. “A figure then appeared to him in his dreams telling him to sing about creation, which Caedmon miraculously did, producing the nine-line hymn.”
The poem, in modern translation, begins: “Now we must praise the guardian of the heavenly kingdom, the might of the creator and his intention.” It continues through the creation of earth and heaven, closing with “the almighty lord.”
The newly found manuscript, produced at the Benedictine abbey of Nonantola in northern Italy around the 9th century, is one of the oldest copies of Bede’s history. Two earlier manuscripts contain the poem in Old English but only as marginal jottings or appendices.
“Prior to the discovery of the Rome manuscript, the earliest one was from the early 12th century. So this is three centuries earlier than that,” Faulkner said. “It attests to the importance that was already being attached to the English in the early 9th century.”
The book’s journey to Rome was circuitous. Monks at Nonantola copied it; centuries later, as the abbey declined, it moved to another abbey in Rome, then to the Vatican, and finally to a small church. Some manuscripts vanished and later surfaced in the hands of international collectors. This copy passed through the English antiquarian Thomas Phillipps, the Swiss bibliophile Martin Bodmer, and eventually the New York rare books dealer H.P. Kraus. Italy’s culture ministry acquired it from Kraus in 1972 and placed it in Rome’s library, where it drew little attention.
Magnanti realized the manuscript was virtually unstudied because of its complex history. “I realized that, because of the very complex history of this book, no Bede scholar had really looked at it,” she said. “So it had been virtually unstudied.”
The library has digitized the entire Nonantolan collection and made it freely accessible, part of a larger project to put thousands of rare books online. Andrea Cappa, head of manuscripts and the rare books reading room, said the discovery “is just one starting point, a single manuscript that might pave the way for countless other discoveries, in countless other fields, through international cooperation like this.”