Béowulf is the longest and best-known Anglo-Saxon heroic poem. It has come to us in a single manuscript kept at the British Library, the Cotton Vitellius. The poem has 3182 lines in alliterative verse and was composed between the 7^th and the 10^th century for a Christian audience on the basis of the Anglo-Saxon tradition. Béowulf balances two periods in the life of the hero whose name it was called after: its youth exploits, when at the court of the Danish king Hrothgar he slew Grendel, a man-eating giant devastating Hrothgar’s domains, and his mother afterwards; then his last fight as an elderly king of the Geats against a dragon that threatens his people. J. R. R. Tolkien had a prominent role in Béowulf’s study and critics as he published a seminal article entitled Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, which was republished with other essays of his in the collection The Monsters and the Critics and other Essays. Conversely, Béowulf was a important source of inspiration for Tolkien: some narrative elements of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings originate in it.

The prologue of Béowulf tells of the rise of the Danes and their royal house, the Scyldings. The allusion of Scyld’s lone arrival as an orphan boy in a mysterious boat from the West is linked with the legend of King Sheaf, a hero of Germanic foundation myths in Anglo-Saxon tradition. Tolkien retold this story in his poem King Sheave, attached to his unfinished novel The Lost Road (p. 87-91 of The Lost Road and other writings), and later made a prose version for The Notion Club Papers (published in Sauron Defeated pp. 273-276). However, in Béowulf, the legend is rather ascribed to Scyld, the eponym ancestor of the Scyldings, which is construed as descendent of Sheaf as testified by the patronym Scéfing.

Note that the Béowulf mentioned on line 18 is a different character from the hero of the poem (who is a Geat and not a Dane). Many scholars, including J. R. R. Tolkien himself, have considered that it is an analogical alteration of an earlier Béow, a name that appears (in various forms) in legendary genealogies of ancient Germanic kings.

We added acute accents on long vowels and diphthongs, following the indications of André Crépin’s edition of Béowulf. The modern English version is extracted from J. R. R. Tolkien’s prose translation and approximatively arranged so as to match the lines.

The text’s transcription emulates the Insular script, a style of the Latin alphabet of Irish origin, used in most Old English manuscripts. We made use of Peter S. Baker’s typeface Beowulf1.