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Beowulf and the Homeric poems appear oral compositions.

Yet they are written ; ;

at some stage in their evolution they were transcribed.

Albert B. Lord suggests that the Homeric poems were dictated to a scribe by a minstrel who held in his mind the poems fully matured but did not himself possess the knowledge of writing since it would be useless to his guild, and Magoun argues that the Beowulf poet and Cynewulf may have dictated their verse in the same fashion.

This explanation is attractive, but is vitiated at least in part by the observation that Cynewulf, though he used kennings in the traditional manner, was a literate man who four times inscribed his name by runes into his works.

If Cynewulf was literate, the Beowulf poet may have been also, and so may the final redactor of The Iliad and The Odyssey.

In lieu of the amanuensis to the blind or illiterate bard, one may conceive of a man who heard a vast store of oral poetry recited, and became intimately familiar with the established aids to poetizing, and himself wrote his own compositions or his edition of the compositions of the past.

Other theories of origin are compatible with the formulaic theory: Beowulf may contain a design for terror, and The Iliad may have a vast hysteron-proteron pattern answering to a ceramic pattern produced during the Geometric Period in pottery.

The account of the growth and final transcription of these epics rests partly, however, upon the degree to which they were formulaic.