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New copy of earliest poem in English, written 1,3k years ago, discovered in Rome

tcd.ie

by giuliomagnifico·3mo ago·134 comments·view on hn ↗

134 comments

Of course the article is about the archaeological discovery, but if you're curious (as I was) what the poem is, it's "Caedmon’s Hymn":

"Now we must praise the protector of the heavenly kingdom the might of the measurer and his mind’s purpose, the work of the father of glory, as he for each of his wonders, the eternal Lord, established a beginning. He shaped first for the sons of the earth heaven as a roof, the holy maker; then the middle-world, mankind’s guardian, the eternal Lord, made afterwards, solid ground for men, the almighty Lord."

via https://imagejournal.org/article/caedmons-hymn-the-first-eng...

Thanks, came to the comments for this!

Reading Old English as a Scandinavian is always interesting, because if you squint hard enough, you can easily see how the languages are so deeply related. So many modern Scandinavian words have what seem to be lost cognates in Old English, and I suppose vice versa.

That said, I wish translations into contemporary English went further to preserve the etymology of certain words and the grammatical structure of the poem, even if it would make for a much more awkward text. For example, this text translates "middangeard" as "middle-world", which is correct, but it is cognate with "Midgård", which is the Norse mythological name for Earth. (In Scandinavian translations of J.R.R. Tolkien, "Middle Earth" is translated as "Midgård".) I think this lets us understand more about how writers of Old English understood the world, and how it was connected to the broader mythological landscape in North/Western Europe around this time, how Christian and Pagan belief systems were interacting through language as the region was in the process of christianization.

Yes, but J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a guide on this (after seeing a couple of really bad quality translations) which later translations benefited from:

https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Guide_to_the_Names_in_The_Lo...

that this was in _A Tolkien Compass_ which was one of the first books I purchased w/ my own money (along w/ _A Tolkien Reader_) is arguably a big part of why I chose to study languages early on in my life.

As someone with native command over Hindi and, unless it's spoken by folks from certain UK countries, English, who also spoke and read Sanskrit quite well during school, I had a period of a few months when I went down the rabbit-hole of wonderful general linguistic history and the interrelation among them. I was shocked beyond imagination to see how we might actually have been more the same than different, if we go back far enough (not even prehistoric 'far enough') in each case (even the languages which are geographically distant currently). But then, of course, civilisation happened.

There was a UK TV show years ago that I've always remembered where the presenter tried to buy a cow using Old English with a Frisian speaking farmer in Holland:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeC1yAaWG34

> I wish translations into contemporary English went further to preserve the etymology of certain words

This is how the Icelandic sagas were translated into English in the nineteenth century. Translators then almost always chose the English cognate of the Old Norse world, even if that English cognate was obsolete or its meaning had changed. Far from helping immerse readers in the medieval world, the effect (at least for modern sensibilities) is offputting and goofy, and in the twentieth century publishers like Penguin replaced those translations by new ones with a very different approach. More judicious use of the Germanic lexicon in English, à la Tolkien, provides a more appealing atmosphere of olden times.

Out of curiosity, what are the other two realms? (I assume it’s two)

This is exactly the kind of thing that makes Old English fascinating even if you don't know the language properly

This was archival research, not archaeology though. This book was located in an archive, and it's mostly in Latin with the Old English content being quite incidental, which explains why it was not noticed until now.

The article has a link to the poem under the text [Caedmon’s Hymn] (unsurprisingly).

This is the text in Old English for anyone looking: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47296/caedmons-hymn-5...

Actually, here is the full text with the modern English inserted:

  Nu scilun herga hefenricæs uard
  Now let us praise Heaven-Kingdom's guardian,

  metudæs mehti and his modgithanc
  the Maker's might and his mind's thoughts,

  uerc uuldurfadur sue he uundra gihuæs
  the work of the glory-father—of every wonder,

  eci dryctin or astelidæ.
  eternal Lord. He established a beginning.

  he ærist scop ældu barnum
  He first shaped for men's sons

  hefen to hrofæ halig sceppend
  Heaven as a roof, the holy Creator;

  tha middingard moncynnæs uard
  then middle-earth mankind's guardian,

  eci dryctin æfter tiadæ
  eternal Lord, afterwards prepared

  firum foldu frea allmehtig
  the earth for men, the Lord almighty.

Public Domain audio:

https://librivox.org/caedmons-hymn/

The text is read in the Early West Saxon dialect. Same version found here (incl. OGG Vorbis format):

https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/19677

  Nu scilun herga hefenricæs uard
  metudæs mehti and his modgithanc
  uerc uuldurfadur sue he uundra gihuæs
  eci dryctin or astelidæ.
  he ærist scop ældu barnum
  hefen to hrofæ halig sceppend
  tha middingard moncynnæs uard
  eci dryctin æfter tiadæ
  firum foldu frea allmehtig

"Caedmon's Hymn"

Knowing both Norwegian and Dutch, most words here is surprisingly similar to modern words:

hefenricæs = himmelrikes (no)

uerc = werk (nl)

eci = evig (no) / eeuwig (nl)

ærist = eerst (nl)

barnum = barn (no)

sceppend = schepper (nl)

EDIT: Hearing the poem read also gives dutch / germanic vibes: https://gutenberg.org/files/19677/ogg/19677.ogg

Oh, what? Is "eci" (eternal?) the origin of "Ecki Thump" - Yorkshire version of OMG?

My degree is in Celtic Studies. This kind of discovery may be surprising to those not versed in it but not those who have studied these languages. Some of the best preserved Old Irish, for instance, is in St. Gallen in what is now Austria and Milan.

There is still an entire Medieval European world out there in the archives still waiting to be discovered. Sadly, there are not many of us who have the skills to do this and we are not paid very well or often not at all.

Oh that's interesting! In my mind we are now on the cusp of being able to scan all these archives and have them be read by LLMs (in a first pass). Do you agree with that assessment, or am I being naive here?

Here's the old English poem! https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47296/caedmons-hymn-5... Should be in the public domain by now eh?

  Nu scilun herga hefenricæs uard
  metudæs mehti and his modgithanc
  uerc uuldurfadur sue he uundra gihuæs
  eci dryctin or astelidæ.
  he ærist scop ældu barnum
  hefen to hrofæ halig sceppend
  tha middingard moncynnæs uard
  eci dryctin æfter tiadæ
  firum foldu frea allmehtig

I couldn't make hide nor hair of it without the translation, but with the translation I see quite a few more words than just "and his" that have stayed around:

  hefen: heaven
  uerc: work
  uard: guard/ward
  hrofæ: roof
  æfter: after
  middingard: Earth, to Marvel
  allmehtig: almighty

Despite what The Poetry Foundation claims, and despite the Modern English translation by one of their own, the Early West Saxon text is Public Domain.

Although The Poetry Foundation still promises to track all your content

The OP article, published by Trinity College Dublin, and the original, and the photograph, are expressly CC-BY-ND 4.0. This is not a "free license", but it is a Creative Commons License.

https://theconversation.com/we-found-a-lost-copy-of-the-earl...

I think also there's barnum = bairn's (as in children), and foldu = fold (as in sheepfold). Or just field, same thing.

1,3k years ago is such a weird way to write it. Makes sense if we are talking millions of years, but why not write "in 700" or just "1300 years ago"

The title is from the HN user, the actual post uses 1,300 everywhere.

So you can write it down to tech brainrot.

it was 1.3e-6 billion years ago!

Century would be plenty. And having Rome mentioned with some weird negative number leads to first thought being English in Roman era? How does this deduct...

Probably a German or French speaker forgetting that , is never a valid decimal separator in English.

Yeah, I felt the same. Especially since 1300 uses the same numbers of characters as 1.3k

For those interested in learning old English, I’ve been going through Oswald Bera by Colin Gorrie -

https://colingorrie.com/books/osweald-bera/

Basically it’s a full blown story/graded reader with no modern English apart from vocabulary. You build an understanding of the language as you read the book and what is initially gibberish becomes quite clear as you progress . It does help if you’ve had a lot of exposure to German ( vocab and grammar), or barring this any case inflected language.

What’s noticeable is that it’s about 200 pages long, so the story gets quite sophisticated , and rather unexpectedly the book is a bit of a page-turner !

This is super interesting! I wonder if there is something like this for other languages!

Article could benefit from some editing: the poem is from variously the 7th, 8th and 9th centuries! After reading a few times I get that one date is the supposed composition date, the second is the publication date of Beade, and the last is the date of transcription for the copy in Rome.

Yeah, that threw me as well.

Also worth pointing out that the Old English version at each of those dates probably varied quite a bit. This was the time period over which Old English was being influenced by external factors such as Norse and Latin.

It really baffles (and amazes) me that Old English is practically unintelligible to modern day English speakers.

If you go back half a millennium, most languages are the same.

The sign above the door at the primary school outside Karlstejn Castle is unreadable to a speaker of modern Czech.

School website: https://www.skolakarlstejn.cz/

Better pics can be found easily.

It's quite rare for a language to remain close enough to be intelligible.

English is a mongrel, with influences from old French and ancient Saxon and Norse and Celtic. Every few centuries you go back, you strip away whole layers of additional vocabulary left by the descendants of successive invasions.

That's because we're fed the massively oversimplified idea that English was one language, spoken all over the UK, and developing in a single straight line from Old English, to Middle English, to modern English.

It's obvious that today's connected society - leading to any single language being very widespread for mutual intelligibility - bears no resemblance to the way things were many centuries ago. But we're conditioned to think in terms of our own experience until we really think about it or have it pointed out. Back then, the UK was split into many different dialects, largely consolidated later by the use of the printing press. Those dialects had so much difference in some ways, that snippets of them could sound like related-but-different languages.

(And there's very little relative difference between modern English and "middle English", which is easy for us to read, notwithstanding differences in the not-yet-standardised spelling.)

And most importantly, across history, the literary language has always been the language of the elites, the ruling class, which is often not the same language spoken by the plebs. Since the language they spoke is therefore missing from the historical record, it's sometimes open to interpretation and guesswork. Many historical linguists try to make it known that middle-to-modern English can't have come directly from the dialect of Anglo-Saxon we now call Old English, but overturning (or even clarifying) dogma from the early days of any field, against years of written encyclopedias, is very difficult.

I absolutely love post-Roman, pre-Norman British writing because it's so rare it gives the era a sense of mystery. This is of course the time when King Arthur is supposed to have lived. In the absence of contemporary records, the impulse to fill it with wizards and dragons is understandable.