Bede, a Northumbrian monk, completed his celebrated Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People) in 731. It was written in Latin. HE was widely copied, still in Latin (though as time passed, those copies were gradually translated into Old English).1 For the purposes of this post what’s important is that the earliest surviving poem in Old English, Cædmon’s Hymn, exists today because Bede reproduced it in his history, though only in his own Latin translation. Subsequent copies added Old English translations of the poem at the end or in the margins.2
Now, excitingly, Elisabetta Magnanti and Mark Faulkner of Trinity College, Dublin, have found a previously unexamined copy of HE, this one produced at Nonantola in north-central Italy in the first third of the ninth-century—that is, within a century of Bede’s completion of the original. But, wait! There’s more! The seriously cool part about all this is that in this version of HE, Cædmon’s Hymn is included in full, in the main text, in Old English. This is 300 years earlier than in any other version.
Here’s the abstract:
This article describes Rome, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Vitt. Em. 1452 + Durham (North Carolina), Duke University, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Lat. 140, a copy of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum made at Nonantola, north-central Italy, in the first third of the ninth century. The manuscript’s complex provenance history has meant its existence has only fleetingly been acknowledged in scholarship on the Historia ecclesiastica, which has failed to recognise it contains a copy of the Old English version of Cædmon’s Hymn, the third oldest, after those in the Moore and Leningrad Bedes, and the earliest surviving text of the Northumbrian eordu recension. The article presents a diplomatic transcription of this new text of the Hymn, as well as a new critical edition, stemma, and history of the eordu recension. We also discuss its likely punctuation, which, uniquely for Old English, seems to have consisted in interword interpuncts.3
They present “a new edition of the eordu recension, based on Rm, with variants from Di, Pa and Br, using the punctuation from the most recent critical edition, by O’Donnell”. For those who geek out on this kind of thing, I recommend you go read the paper (link in the second paragraph).
Rather than reproduce their—very nifty, I’m sure, but frankly outside my scope of interest—reasoning, here instead is the new edition with all the fiddly bits—footnotes etc—taken out:
New Edition of the Eordu Recension
Nu pue sciulun herga hefunricaes puard,
metudaes maechti, and his modgeğanc,
puerc puldurfadur — suæ he pundra gihuaes,
eci drichtin, or astalde!
He aerist scoop eordu bearnum
hefen to hrofe, halig sceppend;
đa middumgeard, moncinnes peard,
eci drichtin, aefter tiade
firum on foldu, frea allmechtig.
I’ve decided to do my own translation—but that won’t be today. Meanwhile, I can recommend Roy Liuzza’s (I like his translation of HE, too).
- I don’t know—I’m not sure anyone does—when the first OE translation was written down, but it was before the tenth century ↩︎
- I’ve talked about this before—because in my interpretation of history it was Hild who recognised the importance of religious praise songs in the vernacular; it would have been at her instigation that it was first written down—but if you want to refresh your memory, Wikipedia has a very reasonable entry. ↩︎
- Magnanti E, Faulkner M. A New Early-Ninth-Century Manuscript of Cædmon’s Hymn: Rome, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Vitt. Em. 1452, 122v. Early Medieval England and its Neighbours. 2026;52:e9. doi:10.1017/ean.2025.10012 ↩︎
Gemæcce 
I wondered if you’d spot that story! It’s very exciting. I am still waiting for another early copy of Beowulf to emerge from a monkish library.
Excellent post, Nicola! Thank you for the interesting topic. Given that Bede wrote in Latin and that the Wikipedia link offers a translation of Caedmon’s Hymn in Northumbrian Old English etc., I am wondering how you tackled the language barrier in your research? For example, it seems “guardian” can be written in Old English as “puard”, “peard,” or “uard.” Probably some other ways, too!
Menewood is excellent! It has me revved up to learn more about 7th century Elmet. My great-grandfather immigrated from Bradford in the early 20th century so it’s hitting home very much.
That particular word is easy—I think of it as ward. As in door-ward, door-warder, door-warden. But in language terms I have to tread a line between ‘accurate’, that is, the kind of definition you’d find in a dictionary most academics might agree upon, and ‘true’, that is, the sort of meaning the rings true to the reader—and in research terms the reader is me 🙂 Some words are only found two or three times and carry rather different connotations in each case; some words are hapax legomena, that is, used only once. In which case all bets are off and you can decide for yourself.
Frankly, my Latin isn’t good, and my Old English is terrible. I rely on others’ discussions of different editions, rescensions etc, use dictionaries/glossaries a lot, and then take my best guess.
Don’t disparage your (second/third) language skills as terrible, Nicola! Other than my medical student friends, I don’t know anyone who knows Latin and no one I know can read Old English. We maybe veni vidi vici and I’ll bet they don’t know where the phrase comes from!