Theories of lengthy oral transmission of the poem have caused scholars to emend individual readings, even filling up what they perceived as lacunae in the text if they deemed that the metrics or the contents were faulty.
That is to say, its scribes, rather than slavish and sometimes sloppy copyists of an earlier text, could have been close to a contemporary poet who created or recreated the poem.
The latter point was supported by a linguistic analysis done by Joseph Tuso, who compared the poem's diction with three important contemporary texts.
[4] Kiernan's proposed 11th-century origin of the poem did not go unchallenged, but even critics such as Joseph Trahern who didn't accept this proposition praised Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript as "an impressive and valuable book that provides a wealth of paleographic and codicological information, [which] corrects a good deal of earlier scholarship, and clarifies a number of questions concerning the manuscript through a new and first-hand description of it".
Kiernan, however, after extensive research in the Danish National Archives in Copenhagen, argued that Matthews's lack of knowledge of Old English in fact was a bonus: since he came to the manuscript without prejudice, he copied what he saw, and any errors he made were systematic misreadings.
In addition to continuing his work on medieval topics he has published on the archaeology of the Georgia coast, in particular on WPA archaeologist Preston Holder.