Bede’s Death Song

Bede’s Death Song, St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 254, p. 253 (c. 860). The text is written in Carolingian minuscule; the language is mostly Latin, aside from Bede’s Death Song, which is written in Old English.

The following excerpt of Cod. Sang 254 contains an Old English poem called Bede’s Death Song. The poem is preserved at the Abbey Library of St. Gall and in other places, while the original copy was presumably written at the abbey of Wearmouth-Jarrow in the North of England, where the Venerable Bede (c. 673-735 CE) spent the largest part of his life. The poem is part of a letter originally written by Cuthbert, a former student of Bede’s. Cuthbert wrote the letter to a man called Cuthwine, talking about Bede’s death in the year 735 CE. The letter is written in Latin except for the poem itself. This specific copy is dated to around 860 CE due to its Carolingian minuscule script and binding technique. Cuthbert’s letter is an addendum to Josephus’ commentary on the Book of Isaiah, which was first mistakenly attributed to be Bede’s writing. This provides a possible reason for the grouping together of the two texts.

The poem consists of one sentence, describing the death of the Venerable Bede. It is significant due to two main reasons: Firstly, it comprises one of the few surviving written poems in the Northumbrian dialect of Old English and, secondly, it represents a unique manuscript due to its original text stemming from Anglo-Saxon England and the language being present in a Swiss abbey. The St. Gall manuscript was possibly produced at the Abbey of St. Gall itself, like many of the other manuscripts residing in the archive, or possibly at the Abbey of Reichenau. Additionally, surviving letters from the eighth century suggest that Lullus, bishop of Mainz, might be one of the possible correspondents with the British Isles, and thus a facilitator of this Old English manuscript by Cuthbert reaching Switzerland before it was transmitted into the Cod. Sang. 254 manuscript.

The script is a Carolingian minuscule and displays the letter forms and ligatures typical of that script. The word spacing is tricky here, as orthographical conventions at the time were different to our current ones. Try to thus separate unsegmented text into single words and to combine spaced out morphemes to form one word. The Tironian nota ⁊ is consistently used for the word and. As the text is written in Old English, we find the letter ash (æ). The flat-topped g (ᵹ) character has a long-pointed tail and is written as a g. Moreover, the letters f (ꝼ), r (ꞃ) and long s (ꞅ) are sitting on the baseline, which sometimes makes r difficult to distinguish from s and f. Furthermore, the Old English characters wynn (ƿ) and thorn (þ) are absent, hence the manuscript uses <uu> instead of the wynn character and <th> instead of the thorn. Abbreviations should be written out in full.