Rare 8th-Century Caedmon's Hymn Copy Emerges in Rome Manuscript

9 articles · Updated · The Herald Journal · May 17

A long-lost copy of Caedmon's Hymn has been identified in five lines of text in an 8th-century manuscript at Rome's National Library.
The poem is significant because it is regarded as the first work ever written down in Old English.
The newly visible passage appears in a manuscript copy of the Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People.
The find adds a rare witness to one of the earliest surviving texts in the English language and highlights Rome's library holdings as a source for medieval literary discoveries.

Why did a 9th-century Italian monk embed England’s first poem, in its original language, within a sacred Latin text?

A stolen manuscript held England’s literary origin for centuries. How many more treasures are hiding in digitized archives, waiting to be found?

This long-lost poem has unique punctuation. Could this detail rewrite our understanding of how ancient texts were written and read?