The Beowulf Poet

Nothing is known of the Beowulf poet: not a name, a region, or even a firm date. The poem survives in exactly one manuscript, the Nowell Codex, copied around the year 1000 by two scribes whose handwriting historians can distinguish but not identify, itself likely a copy of an earlier, lost text.

That manuscript nearly didn't survive at all: it passed through Tudor-era monastic dissolution into a private library that caught fire in 1731, scorching its edges before firefighters saved the codex itself. It sat largely unread by a wide public until an Icelandic scholar transcribed and published it in 1815.

The poem it preserves already looks backward: a Christian narrator recounting pagan Germanic heroism with an elegiac sense that the world it describes is already gone, doomed monsters and mortal kings alike.