Oldest English poem found in medieval manuscript

Researchers in Ireland have unearthed what is believed to be the oldest surviving English poem, discovered within the pages of a medieval book housed in a Roman library.

The remarkable find left the academics “speechless” as they digitally browsed the ancient text. “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, said. She added that the poem’s integration directly into the main body of Latin text was “extraordinary”.

The poem, known as Caedmon’s Hymn, was composed in Old English by a Northumbrian agricultural worker in the 7th century. It appears within certain copies of the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, a seminal work written in Latin by the monk and saint, the Venerable Bede.

Bede’s historical account is one of the most widely reproduced texts from the Middle Ages, with over 200 manuscripts known to exist, according to Magnanti’s colleague Mark Faulkner, an associate professor of medieval literature at Trinity. Faulkner considers Caedmon’s poem to be the very genesis of English literature.

The manuscript discovered by Ms Magnanti and Mr Faulkner dates from the 9th century, making it one of the oldest. While two earlier copies contain the poem in Old English, researchers note that these were added as afterthoughts — either translated from Latin and scrawled into the margin by later scribes or appended separately, rather than being an integral part of the main text.

“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,” Mr Faulkner said.

And it’s something of a miracle they uncovered it at all. Poem was composed after a dreamCaedmon is said to have composed the poem while working at Whitby Abbey in North Yorkshire, after guests at a feast began reciting poems, Mr Faulkner said.

“Embarrassed that he didn’t know anything suitable, Caedmon left the feast and went to bed,” he 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.”

Some 1,400 years later, this copy of his poem resurfaced in Rome’s main public library — but not before crossing the Atlantic Ocean at least twice and changing hands even more times.

Monks transcribed this copy of Bede’s history in the scriptorium of the Benedictine abbey of Nonantola, one of the most important transcription centres during the Middle Ages, located near modern-day Modena in northern Italy, according to Valentina Longo, curator of medieval and modern manuscripts at Rome’s National Central Library.

In the 17th century, as the abbey’s importance declined, its vast collection of manuscripts was shifted to another abbey in Rome, then moved to the Vatican and finally on to a small church. Along the way, some of the texts went missing, only to emerge in the early 19th century in the possession of famous international collectors, Ms Longo said.

This copy of Bede’s history went to renowned English antiquarian Thomas Phillipps. He fell on hard times, selling off bits and pieces of his collection, and Swiss bibliophile Martin Bodmer secured the book. From there, somehow, it arrived in New York City, in the trove of Austrian-born rare bookseller H.P. Kraus during the 20th century. Italy’s culture ministry was scouring the world for the Nonantola abbey’s missing manuscripts, snapping them up in auctions and from collectors around the world.

It bought the copy of Bede’s history from Kraus in 1972, Ms Longo said, and since then the illustrious text has remained in Rome’s library — but received scant notice.

Enter Ms Magnanti, who had spent over four years studying Bede’s history and was compiling a catalogue of extant copies.

“I knew that the book was listed in the library’s catalogue, so I was almost certain that the book was, in fact, still here,” she said. “I realised that, because of the very complex history of this book, no big scholar had really looked at it. So it had been virtually unstudied.” She emailed the library, which confirmed the book was in its stacks. Three months later, she received digital images of the entire manuscript.

The library has digitised the entire Nonantolan collection and it is freely accessible through the website, Ms Longo said.

It is part of a massive project by the library to make thousands of rare books and manuscripts available to researchers around the world, according to Andrea Cappa, the library’s head of manuscripts and the rare books reading room. “The discovery made by the experts of Trinity College 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,” he said.