Although Beowulf is the earliest epic poem in English, it is not about England or England's heroes. Its setting is what we now call Scandinavia, particularly Denmark and southern Sweden (the latter area being referred to as Geatland in the poem), and its cast-list includes a selection of both historical and legendary figures from the period of the fourth to sixth centuries known as the ‘age of migrations’, when Germanic tribes spread across much of western Europe (some of them eventually reaching, and sacking, Rome). The settlement of Britain in the mid-fifth century by Angles, Saxons and other tribes – who would come to be known collectively as the ‘English’ – was itself part of this process. For them, therefore (and for the great number of later settlers, mainly Danes, who arrived during the ninth and tenth centuries), the world of Beowulf was, notionally at least, a familiar world, the world in which their ancestral identity had been created. It is within this world that the story of the young Geatish hero Beowulf unfolds: how he saved Denmark under King Hrothgar from the depredations of Grendel and his mother (in the first section of the poem), and how, in old age, he died defending his own kingdom from a dragon.

Our only copy of the 3182-line poem – known universally by the name of its principal character since it was first edited in 1815 – is on fols. 153r–155v of what today is known simply as ‘the Beowulf-manuscript’ (though its older name, the ‘Nowell codex’, referring to its sixteenth-century owner, may still be encountered); this constitutes the second half of a composite British Library volume, Cotton Vitellius A. xv.