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New copy of earliest poem in English, written 1,3k years ago, discovered in Rome
- KurSix 6mo agoThis is the sort of discovery that makes digitization projects feel genuinely magical
- dboreham 6mo agoArticle 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.
- kitd 6mo agoYeah, 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.
- pouwerkerk 6mo agoOf 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-english-poet https://imagejournal.org/article/caedmons-hymn-the-first-eng...
- simonask 6mo agoThanks, 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.
- jgilias 6mo agoOut of curiosity, what are the other two realms? (I assume it’s two)
- e12e 6mo agoIn Norse mythology "the nine realms" encompass the entire world - but there's no definive list of what realms constitute the nine. In the center, humans inhabit Midtgård. The gods in Valhall and the Jotun in Jotunheim. Then there's also Helheim or Hel - for the dead, Alfheim for the elves, Svartalfheim for the dwarves... https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Locations_in_Norse_mythology https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Locations_in_Nor...
- simonask 6mo agoThere's actually nine: - Vanaheim, home of the Vanir, a group of gods associated with fertility. - Asgård, home of the Aesir, the big-name gods (Thor, Odin, Freya, etc.). - Jötunheim, home of the Giants. - Alfheim, home of the elves. - Helheim, the underworld ("Hell"). - Svartalfheim / Nidavellir, home of the dwarves. - Midgård, home of the humans. - Muspelheim, home of fire elementals. - Niflheim, world of mists. (This is the commonly accepted list, but it's always worth mentioning that surviving literary sources of Norse mythology are very scarce. Much of the lore was reconstructed in the 19th century.)
- jibal 6mo agoThe article has a link to the poem under the text [Caedmon’s Hymn] (unsurprisingly).
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- zozbot234 6mo agoThis 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.
- saltmate 6mo ago1,3k 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"
- pegasus 6mo agoYeah, I felt the same. Especially since 1300 uses the same numbers of characters as 1.3k
- ezequiel-garzon 6mo agoProbably they mean to convey significant digits, though I feel it's safe to assume people would read "1300" as an approximation, not pointing to the year 726. I found it odd too. Edit: "The newly-discovered manuscript in the National Central Library of Rome of Caedmon’s Hymn dates from between the years 800 and 830, making it the third oldest surviving text of the poem." So... 1.2k then?
- dotancohen 6mo agoAnother commentator mentions that the poem may have been published 1200 years ago, but authored much earlier.
- dghf 6mo agoThe manuscript is ~1200 years old, but the poem was composed earlier. The Venerable Bede, who died in 735, includes it and the story of its composition in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People: according to that story, it was composed while Saint Hilda was abbess of Whitby, c.660-680.
- electroglyph 6mo agoit was 1.3e-6 billion years ago!
- Ekaros 6mo agoCentury 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...
- cyocum 6mo agoMy 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.
- zeegroen 6mo agoOh 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?
- IAmBroom 6mo agoEven digitizing sources this old entails quite a lot of manual labor.
- giraffe_lady 6mo agoI'm not in this field but I know someone who used to be and we've talked about it a fair bit. A quick overview of what's needed from what I understand: Old books aren't that neat, you tend to have a lot of notes and other documents, translations, scribal annotations from different eras interleaved or in the margins. You need to make decisions about that stuff as you go, which requires being informed about the context and meaning of those documents, that may well be in another language, or from hundreds of years before or after the document you're trying to process. For any given physical object it's quite likely that no single scholar has all the information necessary. It is also extremely important to preserve all the context, things like which exact pages a fragment is stuck between, even its orientation, can be critical information to later scholars. And then in all of this you're handling ancient & precious one of a kind paper documents. It's just slow going, and well beyond what I would even consider "skilled labor" this very much is the work of research & scholarship. By the time you get a camera pointed at a page you're at the easy part.
- makeryi411 6mo ago[flagged]
- rubzah 6mo agoThis is the text in Old English for anyone looking: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47296/caedmons-hymn-56d227a3b602f 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.
- pbhjpbhj 6mo agoOh, what? Is "eci" (eternal?) the origin of "Ecki Thump" - Yorkshire version of OMG?
- lproven 6mo agoAnd indeed the ancient and mysterious Lancashire martial art, of course. https://www.goodiesruleok.com/articles.php?id=17 https://www.goodiesruleok.com/articles.php?id=17
- pfdietz 6mo agoWhich has nothing on the secret Welsh art of self-defense, Llap Goch. https://www.llapgoch.org.uk/ https://www.llapgoch.org.uk/
- mock-possum 6mo agoOh my god is that where Icky Thump comes from
- ButlerianJihad 6mo agoPublic Domain audio: https://librivox.org/caedmons-hymn/ 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 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"
- Agingcoder 6mo agoFor those interested in learning old English, I’ve been going through Oswald Bera by Colin Gorrie - https://colingorrie.com/books/osweald-bera/ 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 !
- agos 6mo agoThis is super interesting! I wonder if there is something like this for other languages!
- engeljohnb 6mo agoThere's tons, if you look up "[language] graded reader" or "[language] nature method." Familia Romana by Hans Orberg is a great one for Latin. I frequently see people call it the gold standard for this kind of book, but they're all Latin enthusiasts, so they're not exactly unbiased.
- Agingcoder 6mo agoI didn’t find that many - you can find graded readers, but very few ‘graded novels’ ( as in a full novel where chapters are progressively harder, not multiple independent tiny stories ) if I may say so
- devilbunny 6mo agoFamilia Romana is the first part of Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata.
- satisfice 6mo agoI bet it starts "Roses are red, violets are blue..."
- bregma 6mo ago"Thaer whunce waes e mann fromm Nantucket...."
- thewanderer1983 6mo agoHere is the translation from the article. Which is slightly different from what is listed below in the comments. Now let us praise Heaven-Kingdom's guardian, the Maker's might and his mind's thoughts, the work of the glory-father—of every wonder, eternal Lord. He established a beginning. He first shaped for men's sons Heaven as a roof, the holy Creator; then middle-earth mankind's guardian, eternal Lord, afterwards prepared the earth for men, the Lord almighty.
- conartist6 6mo agoHere's the old English poem! https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47296/caedmons-hymn-56d227a3b602f 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
- ButlerianJihad 6mo agoDespite 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-earliest-surviving-english-poem-in-a-medieval-manuscript-in-rome-281086 https://theconversation.com/we-found-a-lost-copy-of-the-earl...
- conartist6 6mo agoIt looks to me like Poetry Foundation did it right. The modern translation has a copyright notice, the Early West Saxon version has none. I was being a little coy as anything older than Mickey Mouse is fair game. It's not a particularly marginal call, if you know what I mean
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- card_zero 6mo agoI think also there's barnum = bairn's (as in children), and foldu = fold (as in sheepfold). Or just field, same thing.
- deafpolygon 6mo agoIt really baffles (and amazes) me that Old English is practically unintelligible to modern day English speakers.
- lproven 6mo agoIf 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/ 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.
- DonaldFisk 6mo agoAnglo-Saxon + Norman French + Latin + Greek. Surprisingly few words from Celtic languages.
- troad 6mo ago> The sign above the door at the primary school outside Karlstejn Castle is unreadable to a speaker of modern Czech. What? No it's not. It looks no more than ~100-150 years old, and is perfectly readable if you've ever seen a long s (like ſo).
- lproven 6mo agoIt's really not. After a lot of searching I found... my own post from Reddit 3Y ago! https://www.reddit.com/r/czech/comments/17stwmi/can_anyone_read_the_text_above_the_door_of_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/czech/comments/17stwmi/can_anyone_r... It has a relatively clear photo.
- troad 6mo agoThat's perfectly readable to me as a speaker of modern Czech, and it appears to have been readable to all the commenters on your post too. > W téchto se dozwédá sjnjch pilné robé, Bohu čjm povinné, bratřjm, wlasti, sobě. This is almost modern Czech, with j for í and w for v (which was the standard orthography for hundreds of years and would be familiar to any educated Czech). Take the most famous poem in Czech, in its original orthography from 1836: > Byl pozdnj wečer - prwnj mág > Wečernj mág - byl lásky čas. This is perfectly readable, like your sign. One of the comments claims the sign is from 1487 - I would find this extremely unlikely. The mention of vlast (homeland) is suggestive of the era of the National Awakening (19th century), as is the orthography, font, and diacritics. (And the overall theme of education for God and country seems pretty anachronistic for 1487.) If we go back in time, to say the Kralická Bible (1593), we're still well within the realm of readable text to modern Czechs: > Na Počátku stwořil Bůh nebe a zemi. Země pak byla nesličná a pustá: a tma byla nad propastj: a Duch Božj wznássel se nad wodami. Y řekl Bůh: Buď swětlo: Y bylo swětlo. Let's go back all the way to the earliest Slavic texts, about 1300 years ago, which largely predate Czech altogether: > Iskonï bě slovo. Ï slovo bě u boga. Ï bogъ bě slovo. A modern Czech would understand most of this, with the probable exception of iskonï ([na] konci, but used here to refer to the beginning). They would probably miss the exact tense being used for bě, but guess that it's a copula (they might see it as a portmanteau of bylo and je, which is close enough). This is probably comparably difficult for a Czech as say Chaucer is for an English speaker (ie not terribly), except it is half a millennium earlier than Chaucer. Your overall point about language change has merit, but not all languages have changed at the same exact rate. Balto-Slavic languages are relatively conservative as a group (many linguists were very taken with Lithuanian when it was first noticed within Western academia, as it is so conservative that it has considerable utility in the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European itself). This is probably more detail than you wanted - I hope it's interesting and helpful. :)
- alex-moon 6mo agoI 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.
- ChrisMarshallNY 6mo agoI wonder if it starts "There once was a man from Londinium..." - I'll get my coat...
- KPGv2 6mo agoIt's absolutely amazing to me that we're still discovering things that are held by major libraries. This wasn't discovered in a limestone tomb, accidentally preserved. It wasn't in the basement of some hoary building that was once the personal library of the Medici. This was in a modern library that was built recently (1975), by historical standards. This book would have been, at minimum, catalogued, packed, and unpacked to verify it made the trip. It was't missing. It wasn't unearthed. It was just never read. https://www.cenl.org/library/the-central-national-library-of-rome/ https://www.cenl.org/library/the-central-national-library-of...
- thenforward 6mo ago[dead]
- maximinus_thrax 6mo agoNot sure why they classified this language as 'old English'. It's so far removed (from all perspectives including a fundamentally different grammatical system) from modern or even early modern English, it's a completely different language altogether. I find "old English" to be a highly a misleading name as it implies continuity that simply isn't there in the same way it exists in say German.
- akabalanza 6mo agoRoman here. We have a joke that we cannot dig a hole in the ground without finding a piece of our past, and that makes us hard to progress. Now we are also finding pieces of someone else's past. We are doomed.