5 Writing Mysteries No One Knows

The list, care of the Huffington Post.

From said post...

Who wrote Beowulf?
The epic poem Beowulf is the most important surviving work of Anglo-Saxon literature. Known only from a single manuscript called the Nowell Codex, it is a tale of heroic dragon-slaying exploits so potent that a translation of its 3,182 lines into modern English won Seamus Heaney the Whitbread Book of the Year Prize in 1999. Yet we know almost nothing of the origins of Beowulf. The best that can be said is that it was written somewhere between the eighth and eleventh centuries. As for the identity of the writer, we have no idea at all. The story may, however, have existed for some time, being passed down in the oral tradition, before finally being written down.