Beowulf The Poet

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phrases from each other was accepted and expected.
Francis P. Magoun, Jr., a noted Beowulf scholar, closely examined the first 50 verses of Beowulf and found that approximately 70 percent appear entirely or in part in other Anglo-Saxon poetry, even though there were only about 30,000 lines of Old English poems available for comparison. Magoun maintains that virtually all of the phrasing could be found elsewhere if we had a larger body of Anglo-Saxon works. This clearly alters how we look at the “authorship” of the poem. Some scholars suggest that the person who put together the extant version of Beowulf was no more than an editor or organizer of poems created by others, probably over generations. Others credit the poet with considerable creativity while welcoming the evidence of oral tradition. It may be that a trained scop dictated the work to a scribe or that the poet had become literate, probably educated at one of the monasteries that existed in England at the time, which ...

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