by the Anglo-Saxon king Harold. During the so-called Norman Conquest that ensues, William brings all of England under Norman rule, often by brutal force.

1536 King Henry VIII of England begins the dissolution of the monasteries.

1563 Lawrence Nowell, dean of Litchfield, inscribes his name on the first page of the Beowulf manuscript.

1631 Sir Robert Cotton, an antiquarian and member of Parliament whose library contains the Beowulf manuscript, dies.

1700 The Cotton library is bequeathed to the British Library.

1731 Much of the British Library is damaged in a fire, and the only surviving Beowulf manuscript is nearly destroyed.

1786 Grimur Jónsson Thorkelin (1752-1829), an Icelandic archivist and scholar, comes to the British Library searching for documents pertaining to Danish literature and history. He makes two transcriptions of the Beowulf manuscript, labeled as a Danish epic, and takes them to Copenhagen.

1807 During the Napoleonic Wars, Copenhagen is bombarded and Thorkelin’s house destroyed. His work on the manuscript is lost, and he starts over.

1815 The first printed edition of Beowulf, based on Thorkelin’s transcriptions and editing, appears.

1936 J. R. R. Tolkien publishes his essay “Beowulf. The Monsters and the Critics,” one of several twentieth-century scholarly works that establish the epic poem as a masterpiece of English literature.

Introduction

Beowulf is generally regarded as the first true masterpiece in English literature, but generations of readers have also found the epic to be so filled with complexities that its qualities are not always easy to define. The work provides us with a unique representation of the distant world of the early Middle Ages in Northern Europe, and yet in its very complexity it disrupts our commonplace simplifications of that culture and its historical period. We know that the poem was composed in Anglo-Saxon England using Old English, which was spoken from the early 400s to around 1100 (when, after the Norman Conquest of 1066, the language changed to Middle English). We also know that the only manuscript in which Beowulf survives can be dated from around the year 1000, having endured the effects of time and even of fire, and its present resting place is the British Library.

Even so, we do not know when the poem was composed, and scholars differ so widely on this point that some would date it in the early 700s, while others would place it in the 900s, or possibly even slightly later. This debate is not a matter of interest only to antiquarians, since the time to which we assign the composition of Beowulf, at least in its present form, will affect how we interpret key features of the poem. Moreover, while composed in Old English, this earliest literary masterpiece in our language is set in Scandinavia, and virtually all of the characters are Scandinavian. Why this should be so is still a mystery, especially given the often troubled relations between Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavian Vikings during this period.

Other mysteries likewise abound. We do not know who composed the poem in the form in which it exists in the manuscript. Scholars have generally taken it for granted that the poet was a man, but recent archeological research has unearthed evidence of women serving as scribes in monastic houses. Thus, it is at least possible that a woman could have been involved at some stage of the production of the manuscript. We do know that the poet was working with materials that were, at least in certain notable cases, inherited from a store of traditions. Thus, in addition to the main plot, there are several subplots embedded in the narrative that were drawn from these traditions. As a consequence, many scholars in the nineteenth century believed that Beowulf was composed of many separate traditional lays, or sung narratives, but scholars are now generally convinced that a single poet created the poem as we know it, though it was written down by two different scribes. Especially since J. R. R. Tolkien’s famous “Beowulf. The Monsters and the Critics” was published in 1936 (see For Further Reading), most scholars have stressed the unity of the poem, including its unity of authorship, and have sought to discover the keys to its artistic construction. Even so, there are still fundamental questions about the kind of unity one may find, both in terms of theme and in terms of structure—and even more fundamental questions about the kind of unity one would require in order to judge the success of the poem as a work of art.

Questions about the composition of the epic lead to further questions about the role of the