Document History The poem has survived thanks to the single copy of a copy of the tenth century: his oldest owner is identified Lawrence Nowell, a scholar of the sixteenth century ref. needed]. The manuscript will then appear in the seventeenth century in the catalog of the possessions of Sir Robert Bruce Cotton; Unfortunately, the copy is irreparably damaged during a fire in his library in 1731. The Icelandic researcher Grimur Jonsson Thorkelin performs the first transcription of the manuscript in 1786 and published in 1815, led to sustained research by the Danish government. Since then, the manuscript still suffered some damage, so this is the transcript of Thorkelin which usually forms the basis for philologists. The reliability of reading Thorkelin has been questioned, especially by Chauncey Brewster Tinker in its edition bringing together the different translations of the researchers of the nineteenth century (The Translations of Beowulf). The manuscript is known as the "manuscript of Beowulf" or "Nowell Codex" or "British Library MS Cotton Vitellius" as is now at the British Library in London. The author or authors of the poem; language The question is whether the poem was first designed for the oral transmission of pagan poets of Scandinavian origin and transcribed one or several centuries later by Christian scribes or if it was written by a single Christian author heavily inspired by Scandinavian heritage. A composition over several generations, with a transformation of the text to suit reciters, explain the disjointed nature of the style (size which also makes the originality of Beowulf. The highly structured rhythm of the verse is also in the sense of oral transmission, the pace providing valuable assistance to the memory of the storyteller. However, Beowulf also demonstrates the phenomenon of Christianization of England in the first millennium. Whatever time references to the Bible and God were introduced in the text, and whatever the hand that currently put, these references are the manifestation of a desire to promote Christian monotheism compared to Scandinavian pagan practices and polytheism. As an anonymous text, Beowulf reflects an iconic force with the importance of the cultural matrix in which every text is derived, and conflicting influences within it. The spelling used in the only surviving manuscript identifies two regional variation in Old English: the Englishmen ("anglian") and West Saxon ("west Saxon") which remains dominant here, as in most texts in old English period. To copy that came to us, it appears that two different scribes have succeeded, exchanging their pens after the first half of the text."