The Old English epic poem preserved in a single manuscript from around 1000 CE, recounting the Geatish hero Beowulf's battles against the monster Grendel, Grendel's mother, and a dragon. Beowulf is the oldest surviving long poem in English, the foundational text of English literary tradition, and a document of the Germanic heroic world that shaped medieval Scandinavia and England. Its reception history — from obscurity through nineteenth-century nationalism to Seamus Heaney's landmark 2000 translation — is as significant as the poem itself.
Beowulf survived in one manuscript. One. If that manuscript had been lost in the Cotton Library fire of 1731 — which scorched its edges and destroyed other books nearby — English literature would begin somewhere else. The poem that now anchors the English literary tradition was copied by two anonymous scribes around 1000 CE, sat unread for centuries, and was discovered by scholars only in the eighteenth century. The story of how it became canonical is as interesting as the story it tells.