Beowulf Poet

The author of Beowulf is unknown — an anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet whose single surviving epic, composed in Old English somewhere between the 8th and early 11th centuries, is the longest and most celebrated poem to survive from that period.

The poem survives in one manuscript, the Nowell Codex (British Library, Cotton Vitellius A.xv), damaged by fire in 1731 and now held by the British Library. It tells of the Geatish hero Beowulf's battles with the monster Grendel, Grendel's mother, and, in old age, a dragon.

This text is the 1910 verse translation by the American philologist Francis Barton Gummere, prepared for the Harvard Classics and long in the public domain; it preserves the original's alliterative, four-stress line.