The Old English poem known in the modern era as Beowulf consists of some 3182 lines of alliterative verse. The poem is preserved on folios 129r to 198v of a unique and badly damaged Anglo-Saxon manuscript sometimes called the ‘Nowell Codex’ and now known by its shelf mark as the London, British Library, MS. Cotton Vitellius A.xv. The text was copied by two different scribes, bound alongside a poetic version of Judith (the deuterocanonical Biblical narrative), a prose version of the Life of Saint Christopher, and two texts of marvelous geography known as The Wonders of the East and Alexander’s Letter to Aristotle. Dating the poem remains a point of scholarly controversy between the views of ‘early’ and ‘late’ daters: spanning from some time not too long after the Anglo-Saxon migration to Britain to a late ninth-century or even early eleventh-century (post-Viking invasion and settlement) Anglo-Danish political and cultural moment.3 As R.M. Liuzza notes, “on strictly historical grounds, then, there is no period in Anglo-Saxon history in which a poem like Beowulf might not have been written or appreciated.”4 However, in terms of its textuality, the Beowulf we have is actually a very late Anglo-Saxon manuscript from the late tenth or even early eleventh century.