The Beowulf Poet

The author of Beowulf is an Old English poet whose name is unknown, who lived in England sometime between the eighth and the early tenth century. He knew the heroic songs handed down orally among the Germanic peoples, yet he was a Christian, and set the hero tales of the pagan North within a Christian view of the world. The poem survives in a single manuscript, copied around the year 1000, whose edges were scorched in a library fire in 1731; it escaped destruction by chance and is now in the British Library.