The theme survives into medieval legend and folklore, with dragon slayers such as Beowulf, Sigurd, Tristan, Margaret the Virgin, Heinrich von Winkelried, Dobrynya Nikitich, Skuba Dratewka / Krakus.

M. H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt assert in their introduction to Beowulf in the Norton Anthology of English Literature that, " The poet was reviving the heroic language, style, and pagan world of ancient Germanic oral poetry it is now widely believed that Beowulf is the work of a single poet who was a Christian and that his poem reflects well-established Christian tradition.

The " discovery " of Beowulf in a single manuscript, first transcribed in 1818, came under the impetus of Romantic nationalism, after the manuscript had lain as an ignored curiosity in scholars ' collections for two centuries.

Both of these are important in regards to the uncertainty surrounding the Beowulf manuscript, as the works which it draws from or influences suggest time-frames of composition, geographic boundaries from which it could be composed, or range ( both spatial and temporal ) of influence ( i. e. when it was " popular " and where its " popularity " took it ).

The earliest known owner of the Beowulf manuscript is the 16th-century scholar Laurence Nowell, after whom the manuscript is named, though its official designation is British Library, Cotton Vitellius A. XV because it was one of Robert Bruce Cotton's holdings in the Cotton Library in the middle of the 17th century.

Kevin Kiernan, professor of English at the University of Kentucky, is foremost in the computer digitalisation and preservation of the manuscript ( the Electronic Beowulf Project ), using fibre-optic backlighting to further reveal lost letters of the poem.

The poem appears in what is today called the Beowulf manuscript or Nowell Codex ( British Library MS Cotton Vitellius A. xv ), along with other works.

The Beowulf manuscript itself is mentioned in name for the first time in a letter in 1700 between George Hickes, Wanley ’ s assistant, and Wanley.

" It has been theorised that Smith failed to mention the Beowulf manuscript because of his reliance on previous catalogues or because either he had no idea how to describe it or because it was temporarily out of the codex.

The Beowulf manuscript was transcribed from an original by two scribes, one of whom wrote the first 1939 lines and a second who wrote the remainder, so the poem up to line 1939 is in one handwriting, whilst the rest of the poem is in another.

Since that time, the manuscript has crumbled further, and the Thorkelin transcripts remain a prized secondary source for Beowulf scholars.

Their accuracy has been called into question, however ( e. g., by Chauncey Brewster Tinker in The Translations of Beowulf, a comprehensive survey of 19th-century translations and editions of Beowulf ), and the extent to which the manuscript was actually more readable in Thorkelin's time is unclear.

The question of whether Beowulf was passed down through oral tradition prior to its present manuscript form has been the subject of much debate, and involves more than the mere matter of how it was composed.

There is a wide array of linguistic forms in the Beowulf manuscript.

The first page of the Beowulf manuscript

* Michael Crichton's Eaters of the Dead is a fabricated recreation of the Old English epic Beowulf in the form of a scholastic translation of Ahmad ibn Fadlan's tenth century manuscript.

This is the manuscript that contains Beowulf.

The most important manuscripts are the four great poetical codices of the late 10th and early 11th centuries, known as the Cædmon manuscript, the Vercelli Book, the Exeter Book, and the Beowulf manuscript.

The first page of the Beowulf manuscript

Manuscripts are now designated by library, bookpress, and number: for example, the manuscript of Beowulf is designated Cotton Vitellius A. xv, and the manuscript of Pearl is Cotton Nero A. x.

The first page of the Beowulf manuscript

It is found in the same manuscript as the heroic poem Beowulf, the Nowell Codex, dated ca.

Beowulf was one of Earth's original daughter colonies in the early diaspora which is dated to have begun in 2102 AD, and further Beowulf connects directly to Manticore via a Wormhole, the ' Beowulf-Manticore Bridge ' and the two populations have much intermarried and cross-migrated, giving Beowulf and Manticore an extremely close interstellar relationship.

Limited to a few thousand lines of heroic verse in Anglo-Saxon as in the other Germanic dialects, we cannot say how frequently the kennings in Beowulf recurred in contemporary epic on the same soil.

Beowulf and his warriors come to fight the dragon, but Beowulf tells his men that he will fight the dragon alone and that they should wait on the barrow.

Beowulf is buried in Geatland on a cliff overlooking the sea, where sailors are able to see his tumulus.

The majority view appears to be that people such as King Hroðgar and the Scyldings in Beowulf are based on real historical people from 6th-century Scandinavia.

Work's essay, “ Odyssean Influence on the Beowulf ,” also supported the Homeric influence.

This theory of Homer's influence on Beowulf remained very prevalent in the 1920s, but started to die out in the following decade when a handful of critics stated that the two works were merely “ comparative literature ” although Greek was known in contemporary England.

Friedrich Klaeber somewhat led the attempt to connect Beowulf and Virgil near the start of the 20th century, claiming that the very act of writing a secular epic in a Germanic world is contingent on Virgil.

* Youths riding around on horses at the funeral of a great man-Anchises and Pallas in the Aeneid and Beowulf in Beowulf.

Whether seen as a pagan work with “ Christian coloring ” added by scribes or as a “ Christian historical novel, with selected bits of paganism deliberately laid on as ' local color ', as Margaret E. Goldsmith did in “ The Christian Theme of Beowulf ,” it cannot be denied that Christianity pervades the text, and with that, the use of the Bible as a source.

The Bible can fall into both the category of ecclesiastical sources and also this category, as the Beowulf poet would have relied on Old English translations.

John Miles Foley held, specifically with reference to the Beowulf debate, that while comparative work was both necessary and valid, it must be conducted with a view to the particularities of a given tradition ; Foley argued with a view to developments of oral traditional theory that do not assume, or depend upon, finally unverifiable assumptions about composition, and that discard the oral / literate dichotomy focused on composition in favor of a more fluid continuum of traditionality and textuality.

In The Medieval Hero on Screen: Representations from Beowulf to Buffy, Diana Slampyak claims that Jen is a medieval hero in exile.

" In The Medieval Hero on Screen: Representations from Beowulf to Buffy.

Chance compares the development and growth of Bilbo against other characters to the concepts of just kingship versus sinful kingship derived from the Ancrene Wisse ( which Tolkien had written on in 1929 ) and a Christian understanding of Beowulf.

Tolkien is credited with being the first critic to expound on Beowulf as a literary work with value beyond merely historical, and his 1936 lecture Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics is still required reading for students of Anglo-Saxon.

The Battle on the Ice of Lake Vänern was a 6th century battle recorded in the Norse sagas and referred to in the Old English epic Beowulf.

Mead is featured in many Germanic myths and folktales such as Beowulf, as well as in other popular works that draw on these myths.

" This theft of a cup, Smaug's knowledge of every item in the hoard, and the dragon's ensuing rampage all echo the story of Beowulf, on which Tolkien was a noted expert and which he described as one of his " most valued sources " for The Hobbit.

Many of Smaug's attributes and behaviour in The Hobbit derive directly from the unnamed " old night-scather " in Beowulf: great age ; winged, fiery, and reptilian form ; a stolen barrow within which he lies on his hoard ; disturbance by a theft ; and violent airborne revenge on the lands all about.