Beowulf

Beowulf is the anonymous Old English epic poem, surviving in a single manuscript of around 1000 CE known as the Nowell Codex and held by the British Library. As the poem's own surviving text it is the correct primary source for its content, in the form it has actually come down, rather than a summary or retelling. Its limit is genuinely unresolved, the date of the poem's original composition is long disputed among scholars, with proposals spanning the eighth to the eleventh century, and the source record here deliberately leaves the composition year unset rather than assert a false precision the scholarship does not support. A claim resting on when Beowulf was actually composed, as distinct from when this one surviving copy was written down, needs to engage that unresolved scholarly debate directly.