May 17, 2026 / 10:44 AM EDT
/ CBS/AP
Add CBS News on Google
Researchers in Ireland marveled at their computer screen as they flipped through the digitized pages of a medieval book tracked down in a Roman library. Within them, they 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."About three million words of Old English survive in total, but the vast majority of texts come from the 10th and 11th centuries," Faulkner told CBS news partner BBC News. "Caedmon's Hymn is almost unique as a survival from the seventh century – it connects us to the earliest stages of written English."
