ROME — Researchers from Trinity College Dublin have identified a 9th-century manuscript in Rome's National Central Library containing Caedmon's Hymn, the oldest surviving English poem. The find places the earliest known copy of the poem three centuries earlier than previously documented.

The poem was composed in Old English by a Northumbrian agricultural worker in the 7th century and appears in some copies of the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, written in Latin by the Venerable Bede. Almost 200 medieval manuscripts of Bede's history survive, but prior to the Rome discovery the earliest copy containing Caedmon's Hymn dated from the early 12th century.

In the newly identified manuscript, the poem was located within the main body of the Latin text. Two earlier copies contain Caedmon's Hymn in Old English as afterthoughts translated from Latin and scrawled into margins or appended outside the main text.

"About three million words of Old English survive in total, but the vast majority of texts come from the 10th and 11th centuries," said Mark Faulkner, associate professor of medieval literature at Trinity College Dublin. "Caedmon's Hymn is almost unique as a survival from the seventh century – it connects us to the earliest stages of written English."

Faulkner, who considers the hymn the start of English literature, said the new dating points to the standing the language already held. "Prior to the discovery of the Rome manuscript, the earliest one was from the early 12th century. So this is three centuries earlier than that. And so it attests to the importance that was already being attached to the English in the early 9th century," he said.

Elisabetta Magnanti, a visiting research fellow at Trinity College Dublin's school of English, had spent more than four years studying Bede's history and compiling a catalog of extant copies before the discovery. She emailed the library, confirmed the book was in its stacks, and received digital images of the entire manuscript three months later.

"We were extremely surprised. We were speechless. We couldn't believe our eyes when we first saw that," Magnanti said. "It was extraordinary."

Monks transcribed the copy of Bede's history in the scriptorium of the Benedictine abbey of Nonantola, near modern-day Modena in northern Italy. In the 17th century the abbey's manuscript collection was moved to another abbey in Rome, then to the Vatican, and finally to a small church. Some manuscripts went missing and reemerged in the early 19th century with international collectors, with this copy passing to English antiquarian Thomas Phillipps, then to Swiss bibliophile Martin Bodmer, and later to rare bookseller H.P. Kraus in New York City. Italy's culture ministry purchased it from Kraus in 1972, and it has remained in Rome's main public library since.

Rome's National Central Library has digitized the entire Nonantolan manuscript collection and made it freely accessible through its website. "The discovery made by the experts of Trinity College is just one starting point, a single manuscript that might pave the way for countless other discoveries, in countless other fields, through international cooperation like this," said Andrea Cappa, head of manuscripts and the rare books reading room.