Nonetheless, though we may all know the general outlines of its hero’s contest with the monster Grendel and his mother, many of the cultural concepts from the world of Beowulf strike modern readers as totally alien. The poem survived long enough to be written down, then became known as great literature these many centuries later, because the rich poetic language and the compelling story it tells captivate us still.

These scholarly debates may not interest the average reader much. Some scholars have suggested that the manuscript was made at the end of the 10th century, others in the early decades of the 11th, perhaps as late as the reign of King Cnut, who ruled England from 1016 until 1035.” Originally “passed down orally over many generations, and modified by each successive bard,” writes the British Library, Beowulf took this fixed form when “the existing copy was made at an unknown location in Anglo-Saxon England.” Not only is the location unknown, but the date as well: “its age has to be calculated by analyzing the scribes’ handwriting.

Now, the British Library’s digitization of that sole manuscript allows us to peel back the layers of canonization and see how the poem first entered a literary tradition. Its narrative elements may belong to a previous age but as a work of art it lives in its own continuous present, equal to our knowledge of reality in the present time.” Though we’ve come to think of it as an essential work of English literature, Beowulf might have disappeared into the mists of history had not the only manuscript of the poem survived “more or less by chance.” The “unique copy,” writes Heaney, “( now in the British Library) barely survived a fire in the eighteenth century and was then transcribed and titled, retranscribed and edited, translated and adapted, interpreted and taught, until it has become an acknowledged classic.” Irish poet Seamus Heaney-whose work engaged with the ironies and complications of tribalism and nationalism-had a deep respect for Beowulf in the introduction to his translation of the poem, Heaney describes it as a tale “as elaborate as the beautiful contrivances of its language.

The Beowulf Manuscript by Unknown