Beowulf is the only complete Anglo-Saxon heroic epic we know; there are small fragments of two other poems (Finn and Waldhere) which may have been of similar length. The chance that something as fragile as a parchment should survive over a thousand years is slight indeed. The Beowulf manuscript was discovered by a seventeenth century scholar; it was nearly destroyed in a fire a hundred year later, today it is safely housed in the British Museum