10 facts about Beowolf

1.Beowulf is an Old English heroic epic poem of anonymous authorship

2.Beowulf, a hero of the Geats, battles three antagonists: Grendel, who is attacking the Danish mead hall called Heorot and its inhabitants



3.Beowulf was written in England, but is set in Scandinavia.

4.It is an epic poem told in historical perspective; a story of epic events and of great people of a heroic past.

5.At the same time some scholars argue that, rather than transcription of the tale from the oral tradition by a literate monk, Beowulf reflects an original interpretation of the story by the poet


6.Beowulf is most definitely not a Christian hero, however. Since the epic of Beowulf is penned to be taking place four centuries before the actual epic was written and Scandinavia was not Christianized until at least the 12th century, the native Germanic paganism was the prevalent theological system at the time. It is more reasonably thought that the epic was Christianized by Christian monks, who later rewrote it to wider distribution.



7.The spellings in the poem mix the West Saxon and Anglian dialects of Old English, though they are predominantly West Saxon, as are other Old English poems copied at the time


8.The earliest known owner is the 16th century scholar Laurence Nowell, after whom the manuscript is named, though its official designation is Cotton Vitellius A.XV because it was one of Robert Bruce Cotton's holdings in the middle of the 17th century.


9.Icelandic scholar Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin made the first transcriptions of the manuscript in 1786 and published the results in 1815, working under a historical research commission of the Danish government



10.The fourth and final funeral of the poem is Beowulf's funeral.