We cannot be certain when the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf was composed, how it was created, or exactly when it was written down. What we can do is pay attention to top scholars in the field and make some pretty good guesses.
The only surviving manuscript of Beowulf is written in Old English (Anglo-Saxon). Rather than being composed at a specific time, the poem probably developed out of various influences, especially folk tales and traditions. Parts of it may have originally been performed by court poets or traveling bards (scops, pronounced “shops,” in the Anglo-Saxon) who would have sung or chanted their poems to the accompaniment of a musical instrument such as a harp. We can conclude, then, that the work grew out of popular art forms, that various influences worked together, and that the story may have changed as it developed.
During the late 1920s and early 1930s, an American scholar named Milman Parry revolutionized the study of live performances of epics. He demonstrated convincingly that ancient Greek poems (the Iliad and the Odyssey) were composed in an oral-formulaic style based on tradition and designed to help the performer produce a long piece from memory or improvise material as he went along.
Francis P. Magoun, Jr., in his essay, “The Oral-Formulaic Character of Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry,” published in the literary journal Speculum in 1953 (Vol. XXVIII, 446–467), demonstrates that the poems were recited or, more likely, sung or chanted, to audiences in the way that similar works are presented in Beowulf. An example in the epic itself is the performance of The Finnsburh Episode (lines 1063 ff.) when Hrothgar’s scop honors Beowulf for his victory over Grendel. Magoun points out that the bards relied on language specifically developed for the poetry, formulas worked out over a long period of time and designed to fit the metrical demands of a given line while expressing whatever ideas the poet wished to communicate.
