Anonymous

The identity of Beowulf s author is unknown. The writer was most likely an eighth-century West Mercian or Northumbrian monk who might better be called an editor than an author, for many sections of the poem undoubtedly had a long career in oral tradition before receiving final form in Beowulf. Whatever its source, the final version was recorded in a unique manuscript around the year 1000 A.D. It is the work of a master craftsman who was very well read, conscious of his role as a poet, and extremely skilled at making events and characters stand symbolically for universal human concerns.

Events in History at the Time the Poem Takes Place

English or Danish? There is no recorded history of the earliest of the Old English people known as Anglo-Saxons. Much of what we know about these people is derived from the artifacts they left behind, from...