Which institution holds the surviving Beowulf manuscript today?

The surviving Beowulf manuscript is held by the British Library. Its shelfmark is Cotton MS Vitellius A XV, and the Beowulf text forms part of the manuscript section known as the Nowell Codex.

The codex preserves the only surviving medieval manuscript of Beowulf. It also contains other Old English material, including The Marvels of the East and the poem Judith. The Beowulf leaves were written around the turn of the first millennium, probably in the late tenth or early eleventh century.

The manuscript has had a hazardous history. It belonged to the antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton, whose collection became one of the foundation collections of the British Museum in 1753. The collection transferred to the newly established British Library in 1973. A fire in 1731 damaged the manuscript, but most of the poem remains readable. The Nowell Codex is therefore not a separate modern library; it is the name for the manuscript unit containing Beowulf.