The oldest known poem in the English language was composed by a farm worker in Whitby, England, some 1,300 years ago. Known as Caedmon’s Hymn, researchers have been left “speechless” by the chance discovery of a previously unknown copy of the poem—written the original Old English—inside a 9th-century book kept in an Italian library.
The hymn itself is nine lines long. It’s attributed to a cowherd named Caedmon, who is thought to have composed the poem in a burst of inspiration following a religious dream. Translated into modern English, the poem celebrates a “Maker” and “eternal Lord” who created Earth for humankind. “As the oldest known poem in Old English it is today celebrated as the beginning of English literature,” said Mark Faulkner, one of the researchers behind the new discovery and a professor at Trinity College Dublin, in a statement.
There’s no record of Caedmon jotting the poem down himself—but records of it can be found in copies of a history of Christianity in England written by the Venerable Bede, an English monk and scholar, called the Ecclesiastical History of the English People. These copies primarily include a version of the poem in Latin, with the Old English translation sometimes added later.
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The new version of the poem, however, found in a digitized version of the Ecclesiastical History held at the National Central Library of Rome, includes Caedmon’s Hymn in Old English—and appears to be part of the manuscript's main text, not added in later.
Rome, National Central Library, MS. Vitt. Em. 1452, f. 122v.
“We were extremely surprised. We were speechless,” Elisabetta Magnanti, a visiting research fellow at Trinity College Dublin who helped lead the work, told the Associated Press. “We couldn’t believe our eyes when we first saw that.” The discovery was recently published in the journal Early Medieval England and its Neighbours.
Old English was a precursor to modern English and was spoken in England during the early Middle Ages. Most other known Old English texts date to the 10th and 11th centuries, Faulkner said in the same statement.
“Unearthing a new early medieval copy of the poem has significant implications for our understanding of Old English and how it was valued. Bede chose not include the original Old English poem in his History, but to translate it into Latin,” he said. “This manuscript shows that the original Old English poem was reinserted into the Latin within 100 years of Bede finishing his History. It is a sign of how much early readers valued English poetry.”
Read Caedmon’s Hymn in Old English here, and translated into modern English by Old English scholar Roy Liuzz below:
Now let us praise Heaven-Kingdom's guardian,
the Maker's might and his mind's thoughts,
the work of the glory-father—of every wonder,
eternal Lord. He established a beginning.
He first shaped for men's sons
Heaven as a roof, the holy Creator;
then middle-earth mankind's guardian,
eternal Lord, afterwards prepared
the earth for men, the Lord almighty.
