The date of the manuscript is accepted by most scholars, but until recently most of them have argued that the poem predates the manuscript by at least two hundred years. This assumption has led to some interesting attitudes toward the manuscript.
Thorkelin's early date for the poem derives from a bias that controlled the response to it in the nineteenth century. Following investigations showing how the Homeric poems were based on earlier shorter poems that reflected the spirit of the ancient Greek people, there was a movement in early studies of Beowulf to see it as derivative of the Germanic Volk. Any Christian attitudes in the poem were presumed to be monkish interpolations. Such a reading of the poem allowed Thorkelin to ignore the date of 597, the year when Saint Augustine of Canterbury carried out his missionary work and undertook the conversion of England to Christianity. Since the poem seems quite comfortable in its Christianity (there are no direct New Testament references and no naming of Christ, though the frequent Old Testament references make it seem clear that the poet was a Christian) and free of missionary zeal, it would seem likely that the poem was written at least several generations after the conversion, which would put the earliest date for the composition of the poem at about 700.
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