Transmission
The extant text is a transcript of a loose manuscript folio that was once kept at Lambeth Palace, the London residence of the Archbishops of Canterbury. This manuscript was almost certainly Lambeth Library MS 487. The British scholar George Hickes made the transcript some time in the late 17th century, and published it in an anthology of Anglo-Saxon and other antiquities in 1705. This anthology also contained the first reference to the sole manuscript of Beowulf. Since the time in which the copy was made, the original manuscript folio has been lost or stolen.
Read more about this topic: Finnesburg Fragment