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 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 AP. 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. He considers Caedmon's poem the start of English literature. The manuscript they found is one of the oldest, dating from the 9th century. Two earlier copies contain the poem in Old English, but as afterthoughts—translated from Latin and scrawled into the margin or appended but not within the text's main body, according to the researchers.
The discovery sheds light on the English language's wide diffusion, long before what was previously understood, Faulkner said in Rome, where the duo had gone to view the text in person. "Prior to the discovery of the Rome manuscript, the earliest one was from the early 12th century. ... And so it attests to the importance that was already being attached to the English in the early 9th century," Faulkner said. Caedmon is said to have composed the poem while working at Whitby Abbey in North Yorkshire, after guests at a feast began reciting poems. "Embarrassed that he didn't know anything suitable, Caedmon left the feast and went to bed," Faulkner 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." The library said it has digitized the collection and made it freely accessible through its website. The text of the poem follows.
Nupue. sciulun. herga. hefunricaes. puard. metudaes. maechti. and his.
mod geðanc. puerc. puldur. fadur. suæhepundragiaes
ecidrichtin or astalde. he aeristscoop eor dubearnu¯ hefento
hrofe halig. sceppend. ða. middu¯. geard. moncinnes peard eci
drichtin. aefter. tia de. firu¯. on foldu. frea. allmechtig.
Now we must praise the guardian of the heavenly kingdom,
the might of the creator and his intention,
the work of the father of glory, in that he of each wonder,
eternal lord, established the beginning.
He first created the earth for men,
heaven as a roof, the holy creator,
then the middle earth, the guardian of mankind,
the eternal lord, afterwards created
for men on earth, the almighty lord.
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
