Q&A YOU ASK, WE ANSWER
Who wrote Beowulf?
SHORT ANSWER The heroic tale has stood the test of time; the name of its creator has not
LONG ANSWER Beowulf is the masterpiece of Old English literature: an epic poem of 3,182 lines in which our eponymous fantasy hero rips the arm off the giant Grendel, kills the vengeful Grendel’s mother, and goes out in style by taking out a dragon in his old age. It has inspired countless writers, including The Lord of the Rings author JRR Tolkien, and lives on in numerous seminal translations.
The identity of Beowulf’s writer, however, has not lived on. A good guess is that its author was an Anglo-Saxon poet in England around AD 700-750. This was a time of religious conversion – which explains the blend of pagan and Christian throughout the tale – and while much of the narrative is fantastical, some characters and events mentioned can be traced to the real sixth century.
The story may not have had a single creator at all, of course, but was passed on by oral tradition over generations and tweaked until finally being jotted down in the 11th-century manuscript, the Nowell Codex. It is the only surviving medieval copy, now held by the British Library; its anonymous author is simply referred to as the ‘Beowulf poet’.
248 The number of listed names and addresses in the first London directory, published by the Edison Telephone Company of
