Cool Finds

Researchers Discovered a Lost Copy of the Oldest English Poem, Composed by an Illiterate Cowherd More Than 1,300 Years Ago

This version of “Caedmon’s Hymn” shows how Old English evolved. It also features early use of a punctuation mark that readers of English take for granted today—the period—but not in the expected way

Sonja Anderson | Daily Correspondent

April 30, 2026

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The English language’s oldest poem is “Caedmon’s Hymn,” nine lines of verse composed by a Northumbrian herdsman who lived in the seventh century C.E. Caedmon couldn’t read or write, but after he dreamed of a stranger telling him to sing of “the beginning of things,” he began speaking “verses which he had never heard.”

The cowherd moved into a monastery, learned biblical scripture and reportedly produced much vernacular poetry on sacred Christian themes. But of all his work, only “Caedmon’s Hymn” survives. “Now let us praise Heaven-Kingdom’s guardian,” it begins.

Now, researchers say they’ve discovered an important lost copy of “Caedmon’s Hymn”—dating back some 1,200 years. This version prominently records the poem in Old English rather than in Latin, suggesting that one of the languages of early medieval Britain held its own even against the tongue of the old Roman Empire.

“It is a sign of how much early readers valued English poetry,” says Mark Faulkner, a medieval literature scholar at Trinity College Dublin, in a statement from the university.

Researchers found the Old English iteration in a manuscript held by the National Central Library of Rome, when medieval historian Elisabetta Magnanti requested the library digitize its copy of Ecclesiastical History of the English People from the early ninth century C.E. It’s a text that a monk named Bede originally wrote in 731 C.E., making it the earliest-known book about English history and also the first book to publish “Caedmon’s Hymn.”

Caedmon dictated his poem in his own Northumbrian tongue. But when Bede decided to include the hymn in his History decades later, he set it down in Latin.

Magnanti and Faulkner viewed the newly digitized copy together. “When we saw it, we looked at each other and I said, ‘No one knows about this,’” Magnanti tells the Guardian’s Rory Carroll. “To make sure I wasn’t dreaming, I double-checked the catalogs and there was no mention of it. It was a huge surprise, a very good one.”

Their big discovery? The Rome manuscript printed “Caedmon’s Hymn” completely in Old English. And it “faithfully preserves many features of early Northumbrian” — the poet’s own dialect — the researchers write in a study they published in Early Medieval England and Its Neighbours.

There are only two older recorded versions of “Caedmon’s Hymn,” both printed in copies of Bede’s History. One is at Cambridge University and the other is in Saint Petersburg, Russia. These versions of the poem are written in Latin, with Old English relegated to the margins or the end, per the Guardian.

The new find suggests that by the ninth century C.E., Old English was gaining popularity, according to the researchers. “The absence of the poem would have been felt by the readers, I think, and so that’s why it goes in,” Faulkner tells the Guardian.

The language of Latin, and literacy in general, came to the British Isles with Roman colonists in the first century C.E. It hung on for a long while after the Roman Empire officially withdrew from Britain in the early fifth century. But as Britain’s Roman period ended, Anglo-Saxons came over from Europe. Their Germanic language morphed into the tongue we know as “Old English.”

“About 3 million words of Old English survive in total, but the vast majority of texts come from the tenth and eleventh centuries,” Faulkner says in the statement. “‘Caedmon’s Hymn’ is almost unique as a survival from the seventh century; it connects us to the earliest stages of written English.”

This copy of the hymn is also unique for its punctuation: A period appears after each word. The trait recalls a staple of earlier Latin punctuation—the interpunct, a dot that served as a word separator in text. Faulkner tells the Guardian, “It is part of the early development of ways of dividing words and shows text starting to come toward the presentation of English that we know today.”

“Caedmon’s Hymn” lauds God’s creation of Earth: “Heaven as a roof, the holy Creator; / then middle-earth mankind’s guardian, / eternal Lord, afterwards prepared / the earth for men, the Lord almighty.” It was the first recorded piece of what became a long, long tradition of English Christian verse.

Sonja Anderson | Read More

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in Chicago.