Francis Peabody Magoun, Jr. MC (6 January 1895 – 5 June 1979) was one of the seminal figures in the study of medieval and English literature in the 20th century, a scholar of subjects as varied as soccer and ancient Germanic naming practices, and translator of numerous important texts.

After a brief return to the United States, he went to London and enlisted in the Royal Flying Corps (to become eligible for service in the RAF, he lied and said he was Canadian; he claimed that he was from a town there where all birth records and other vital statistics had been lost in a fire).

When engaged on bombing work he attacked and shot down an enemy machine, with the result that it crashed to earth.

David Bynum, in his history of English studies at Harvard,[8] affirms Magoun's importance as a link between the pioneering work of George Lyman Kittredge in folklore and ethnomusicology (as they related to literary history) and the work of Milman Parry; Magoun took inspiration from Parry and Lord's field observation of the oral poetry of the guslars of Yugoslavia (which they had compared to the Homeric poems), and extended their methods to the study of Anglo-Saxon poetry.

The 1953 article on Beowulf, "The Oral-Formulaic Character of Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry," published in Speculum, was of particular importance in the view of Albert Lord (for whom Magoun served as dissertation advisor; he was also one of Walter Ong's teachers).

Magoun argued that written Anglo-Saxon poetry was essentially a transcription of traditional oral performance, and furthermore, heavily imbued with pre-Christian ideas and values.

His ideas sparked ongoing controversy among medievalists, with some accepting his view, others arguing for a written poetry inspired by traditional idiom and methods (and a complex layering of Christian and pre-Christian influences), and still others insisting that the entire Anglo-Saxon corpus consists of individually authored, written texts with an exclusively Christian matrix of belief.