AP, 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,” said Elisabetta Magnanti, a visiting research fellow at Trinity College Dublin’s school of English.The poem was also within the main body of Latin text, she said, calling it “extraordinary.”
From left, Elisabetta Magnanti and Mark Faulkner from Dublin’s Trinity College, and Valentina Longo of Rome’s National Central Library look at a manuscript containing a rare, long-lost copy of Caedmon’s Hymn, the first poem ever to be written down in Old English, at Rome’s National Library on May 8.
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, said Mark Faulkner, an associate professor of medieval literature at the college.
