But this is the story of Beowulf, a poem once told in timber-framed barns ... There is only one surviving manuscript, and even that was nearly destroyed in an 18th Century library fire.

is that the preserved text shows traces of at least one earlier manuscript from the period just before or after ad 700 (Neidorf 2014a). Linguistic Dating Given the premise that Beowulf was written by ...

The heroic warrior Beowulf. The epic poem Beowulf, which survives in a single manuscript dating from around 1000 AD, and was almost completely unknown until its rediscovery in the 19th century ...