Views concerning the authorship of Beowulf and its place in Old English literature have changed greatly in the last half century. In any account of the poem published in 1900 one might find suggested or stated more or less positively—often practically as facts—such ideas as these: Beowulf was only one of a large body of Old English epics; its subject matter was originally mythical, symbolic of forces of nature; its adventures were at first ascribed to a mythic hero or divinity named Beowa and later transferred to Beowulf, who was probably an actual person (as late as 1908 Brandi still expresses this view); it took shape by a process of natural accretion of popular lays or short heroic poems, or by compilation and interpolation by several hands; its manner and style were indigenous, characteristic of the form which Germanic epic poetry had attained; in origin it was pagan, the Christian passages having been added late by a reviser or interpolator. It is obvious now that all those statements are hypothetical, but they once constituted an orthodox view which was generally accepted.