Where do you find an Old English manuscript?

[wtg]

In a library in Rome, of course!

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 extremely surprised. 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 Associated Press.

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 to be the start of English literature.

https://apnews.com/article/old-english-manuscript-poetry-bede-caedmon-hymn-latin-italy-106769c014901cf06d8a56839d56ac90

[AndyD]

Thanks for posting this WTG.

Whitby, Jarrow(Bede etc) are local history to me so very interesting.
Speaking the poem I struggle to find the rhyme though.

Can you imagine how she felt reading it online in her office, the excitement!
I've held older Egyptian writing on papyrus and it's difficult, even strange, imagining the writer and how it survived over 2000 years. Even turning the pages of an illustrated bible from 1400 gives a reflective feeling similar to looking up at the stars.

I find our history fascinating, the bloody struggle that was life for the vast majority, and the need for meaning, for god.

In the UK Christianity was a cult the Romans initially brought, but the Saxons effectively removed it from the East (& most) of Britain.

This poem dates from the beginnings of the celtic form of Christianity that came via Ireland/Scotland with Aiden of Iona, who settled in Lindesfarne (Holy Island) in the early 600's and spread the word southwards, founding notable abbeys at Tyneside Jarrow, Monkwearmouth, Durham, Hartlepool, Whitby, and York.
York became the Northern centre that Canterbury was in the South.
This was only a few years after Augustine (I think from the Roman Gregorian? form) settled in Canterbury circa 600. There's still a bit of the very old Canterbury church, a wall, to be seen. There's a very old oak stave wall at Greenstead too, from 900AD, oldest wooden building in Europe and a very attractive church.

However to see one of the very first, still mostly original, most complete, stone churches extant from this great missionary era, visit Escomb near to Durham.
Not much to it but has a great feel. Shows the simple room/building built for worship back then, built 670AD.

But I digress