Oldest surviving English poem in history discovered in manuscript in Roman library

ROME — The researchers in Ireland looked at their computer screen, marveling at a medieval book tracked down in a Roman library.They flipped through its digitized pages and found their sought-after treasure: the oldest surviving English poem.“We were extremely surprised.

We were speechless.We couldn’t believe our eyes when we first saw that,” Elisabetta Magnanti, a visiting research fellow at Trinity College Dublin’s school of English, told The Associated Press.What’s more, she said, the poem was within the main body of Latin text: “It was extraordinary.”Composed in Old English by a Northumbrian agricultural worker in the 7th century, “Caedmon’s Hymn” appears within some copies of the “Ecclesiastical History of the English People,” written in Latin by a monk and saint known as the Venerable Bede.

His history is one of the most widely reproduced texts from the Middle Ages, with almost 200 manuscripts, according to Magnanti’s colleague Mark Faulkner, an associate professor of medieval literature at Trinity.He considers Caedmon’s poem to be the start of English literature.The manuscript he and Magnanti found is one of the oldest, dating from the 9th century.Two earlier copies contain the poem in Old English, but as afterthoughts — translated from Latin and scrawled into the margin or appended but not within the text’s main body, according to the researchers.The discovery sheds light on the English language’s wide diffusion, long before what was previously understood, Faulkner said in Rome, where the duo had traveled to view the text in person for the first time.“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.And so it attests to the importance that was already being attached to the English in the early 9th century,” Faulkner said.And it’s something of a miracle they uncovered it at all.Caedmon is said to have composed the poem wh...