Trinity College Researchers Find Caedmon’s Hymn in 9th-Century Manuscript in Rome

Researchers from Trinity College Dublin have identified what is believed to be the oldest surviving English poem, embedded in a medieval manuscript housed in Rome. Elisabetta Magnanti and Mark Faulkner made the discovery after consulting digitized pages of a copy of the Ecclesiastical History of the English People in the collections of Italy’s National Central Library. “We were extremely surprised. We were speechless. We couldnt believe our eyes when we first saw that,” Magnanti said.

The poem is Caedmon’s Hymn, composed in Old English in the 7th century by a Northumbrian agricultural worker traditionally associated with the beginnings of English literature. In several manuscripts of Bede’s work, the hymn appears separately or as marginal additions, but in the Rome copy it is integrated into the main body of the Latin text. Faulkner said the arrangement was “extraordinary,” noting that the manuscript they examined dates from the 9th century, which places the hymn’s presence in the text centuries earlier than the previously earliest known example.

Before this find, the earliest surviving evidence of the poem in its earliest form was dated to the early 12th century. The...