After his death, his attendants bury him in a tumulus, a burial mound, in Geatland. After a period of fifty years has passed, Beowulf defeats a dragon, but is fatally wounded in the battle. Victorious, Beowulf goes home to Geatland in Sweden and later becomes king of the Geats. Oft Scyld the Scefing from scathers in numbers From many a people their mead-benches tore. Lesslie Hall (1892): Lo the Spear-Danes’ glory through splendid achievements The folk-kings’ former fame we have heard of, How princes displayed then their prowess-in-battle. Made around the year 1000, most likely during the reign of King thelred the Unready (978-1016), this manuscript committed to parchment a tale that (in some modern scholars' opinions) had been passed down for centuries. After Beowulf slays him, Grendel's mother attacks the hall and is then also defeated. The first page of the Beowulf manuscript, and a transcription. The manuscript of Beowulf, the greatest poem in the Old English language, can now be viewed online for the first time. In the poem, Beowulf, a hero of the Geats in Scandinavia, comes to the help of Hrothgar, the king of the Danes, whose mead hall (Heorot) has been under attack by a being known as Grendel. The poem fell into obscurity for decades, and its existence did not become widely known again until it was printed in 1815 in an edition prepared by the Icelandic-Danish scholar Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin. In 1731, the manuscript was badly damaged by a fire that swept through a building housing a collection of Medieval manuscripts assembled by Sir Robert Bruce Cotton. Its composition by an anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet is dated between the 8th and the early 11th century. It survives in a single manuscript known as the Nowell Codex. Lawrence Nowell, a sixteenth-century scholar, is the earliest known owner of this manuscript. Beowulf is an Old English epic poem that survives in a single copy in the manuscript known as the Nowell Codex.

'Beowulf' is the conventional title of an Old English heroic epic poem consisting of 3182 alliterative long lines, set in Scandinavia, commonly cited as one of the most important works of Anglo-Saxon literature. The Beowulf manuscript that survives today has two distinct handwritings meaning it may have been composed by two people. The Only Surviving Manuscript of Beowulf.

The Beowulf Manuscript by Unknown