When was Beowulf Written?

Though there is a continuing argument, most scholars believe Beowulf was written during the eighth century A.D. by a Christian poet. The original manuscript does not exist. Apparently, Beowulf was copied several times between the eighth century and the eleventh. The only manuscript dates from the eleventh century. We don't know how many changes the copiers made during these 200 years. The surviving manuscript is known as "British Library manuscript Cotton Vitellius A." It is called this because the book was owned by a seventeenth -century antiquary named Sir Robert Cotton who kept track of his manuscripts by the shelf position in bookcases surmounted by the busts of Roman emperors" (Kiernan 195). One of the two manuscripts inside the Cotton Vitellius is Beowulf, called the Nowell Codex, because a previous owner, Laurence Nowell, left his name in it in 1563. The Beowulf manuscript survived but was largely unstudied, then in 1731 a fire scorched its outer edges.

Who Wrote Beowulf?

In any case, Beowulf is a story written by an English Christian poet (or poets) who is looking back at an older pagan time. The heroes of his story are his people's ancestors, before they conquered England. Historically, these people, the Geats, the Danes, Frisians, Angles, Saxons conquered England in waves of invasions during the . After conquering England, they were known as Anglo-Saxons and they were converted to Christianity in the by missionaries from Rome. The Christian poet knows the 'truth' of the Christian religion and he is describing his ancestors who did not have the benefit of Christianity. The poet does not condemn his pagan forbears, but finds value in their endurance. After all, it is not their fault that they hadn't heard the Christian message. The poet is both proud of his ancestors but compassionate about their ignorance of the Christian religion.