For a sense of the variety of modern opinion, see Chase 1981a. For the older conventional arguments, see Klaeber 1950, cvii-cxx.
Especially considering the phenomenon of medieval diglossia see Stock 1983, 30-87. All in all, the story of the text reads more like an Anglo-Saxon riddle than a Homeric epic journey. Beowulf surfaces as a unique text in the middle of the sixteenth century, and is treated as a poem rather than an archaeological or paleographical curiosity only well into the twentieth century.
There was no Alexandrian Library to (theoretically) hone the textual tradition, no set of scholia to provide fodder for readings or textual emendation, and no Byzantine scholarship to keep interest in the poem alive. We know very little even about the circumstances under which such a poem might have been collected, copied, and transmitted with no real chronology for the verse of this period outside of a few termini a quo, scholars have estimated the "date" of this version of the poem at anywhere between the mid-eighth and early eleventh centuries. Such is not the case with the Beowulf poetry, which comes to us in a single copy and whose date and provenance remain objects of lively debate among paleographers and students of the poem. If the Homeric texts that survive to our time provide only brief glimpses into a long and uncertain past, at least the evidence permits reasonable hypotheses to be drawn about their probable recording and the first standard texts, as well as about some of the prime historical influences which those or related texts must have undergone.
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