Why Read Beowulf

In the article “Why Read Beowulf” by Robert F. Yeager, he addresses the perilous history of the single manuscript, uncertainties of oral transmission, and the use of a pagan, a foreign hero in the medieval Christian England. In the article, Yeager address how most of the reader do not know the author of the story. The reader basically goes in blind reading this story without knowing the “when, why, and where the story was composed?” Other people have tried to discover it’s background, but are not able to figure it out. He mention how scholars predict it might of been passed on by “singers of one generation to the next” or “a singer who recited the poem while a scribe took it down or possible two scribes in whose handwriting Beowulf reached