The circumstances surrounding Beowulf’s genesis have been a matter of speculation and debate for over two centuries. It is one of the most enduring issues in English literary studies. We know the poem because of the Nowell Codex inscribed around the year 1000, but the poem’s date of composition has been particularly contentious. Many scholars have offered a position, and there have been two essay collections on the topic. The geographical provenance of both the poem and the manuscript is also disputed. Northumbria was suggested by Victorian scholars keen to see Beowulf as a product of the ‘age of Bede’, while East Anglia and Mercia have also been proposed. The poem’s process of authorship, particularly its relationship with oral composition and transmission, is also seemingly lost to us. Theories of composition range from seeing the poem as an assemblage of oral folktales to it being the product of an individual, literate author, as discussed in the introduction. It might be both, of course. The circumstances of Beowulf’s authorship are often treated tentatively or avoided altogether: wise moves, perhaps, given the uncertainties. Certainly, a poem’s characteristics and content do not inevitably indicate its manner of origin, and extra-textual evidence must be sought. In the case of Beowulf, there is little to go on. In his overview of the poem, John D. Niles keeps an open mind. He refers to a Beowulf-poet and suggests that the poem ‘comes from a single creative impulse’, but doubts the influence of clerical culture, and does not rule out the idea that the poem was once the ‘property of scops’. Andy Orchard avoids detailed speculation on authorship in his Beowulf companion, though he observes a critical trend away from the idea of the poem as originating in a series of oral lays, to seeing it as the product of an individual. This shift to belief in a single author seems appropriate, and we can therefore speak of a ‘Beowulf poet’, though material concerning many of the historical and mythical events either alluded to or related in the poem almost certainly circulated prior to composition.

Depictions of performance in Beowulf are subtle, complex, and multiform, and are interrelated intrinsically with the poem’s structure.