I asked this a month ago and got the start of some interesting responses that didn’t make the cut. Here it goes again.

My understanding of Beowulf is that there is only a single surviving manuscript, the Nowell Codex, that we know of. It’s considered an incredibly important work. I understand that any modern critic could probably judge it in some way by an existing standard of what makes good literature. Other than that, how have historians determined it was actually a well-regarded piece of literature at its time and not just the equivalent of pulp fiction that just so happens was one of the only examples of Old English literature we could find?

Im interested in how you “prove” ancient literature was important to the culture then and thus still has relevance to us now. To put it another way: if hypothetically all our works of modern literature were destroyed in an apocalypse except for one Stephanie Myers novel that was discovered 1000 years later by historians with a now completely different context for how to judge art, how would they know it wasn’t a “classic”?

TLDR how do we know Beowulf wasn’t just the Twilight of its time