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Kevin Kiernan has written extensively about the role of the two scribes who wrote the Beowulf manuscript. He has emphasized that it is important to examine their work directly, including their various corrections and mistakes. He has also challenged the commonly-held notion that the scribes merely copied from another draft or from dictation and that they made many mistakes in their work. He has particularly emphasized the role of the second scribe in making corrections to the manuscript after it was initially created, including making corrections to the parts originally written by the first scribe.
I think that the idea that the two scribes made many mistakes might have been reinforced by Benjamin Thorpe. In the footnotes of his influential 1865 translation, he made many comments about how particular words did not seem to make sense, and he either implied, or clearly stated, that he thought that the scribe may have made a mistake. The Preface of Volume 1 of the John Mitchell Kemble (1835,37) edition also includes a lot of comments on the mistakes made by the scribes.
The first scribe wrote lines 1 to 1935a, which are in sections 1 to part way through 27, and in Kevin Kiernan's manuscript images 129r through the first three lines of folio 172v, on the Electronic Beowulf CD. The second scribe wrote lines 1935b to 3182, in sections 27 through 43, and in Kevin's images 172v through 198v.
You don't have to take someone else's word for it though as to where the first scribe left off and the second one began. It is clear when you look at the manuscript, even if you can't read Old English, that the handwriting is different for the two scribes. Here are examples from each.
This image of the original manuscript is of the bottom of folio 171r (from the Electronic Beowulf CD by Kevin Kiernan). You can click the image to see a 1802x1282 pixel version (192k in size). The actual size of the page in the manuscript is about 5 inches wide.
You can see that the first scribe wrote the first part of section 27 (or, actually, section 28, according to Kevin Kiernan -- the XXVIII was changed to XXVII, as explained in detail in Professor Kiernan's book).
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This image of the original manuscript is of the top of folio 173r (from the Electronic Beowulf CD by Kevin Kiernan). You can click the image to see a 1626x1018 pixel version (136k in size). The actual size of the page in the manuscript is about 5 inches wide.
You can see that the second scribe wrote the last part of section 27 and the first part of section 28 ("xxviii" at the end of the fifth line). You can also see that the handwriting is different than that of the first scribe.
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This image of the original manuscript is of the top of folio 172v (from the Electronic Beowulf CD by Kevin Kiernan). You can click the image to see a 1604x1076 pixel version (167k in size). The actual size of the page in the manuscript is about 5 inches wide.
You can see that the first scribe wrote the first three lines of this folio, and the second scribe wrote the rest of the page (and he wrote all of the succeeding pages)
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The images and information on the Electronic Beowulf CD really bring home the fact that the Beowulf manuscript is a real physical object, made of vellum and ink, which was created by two different people. It also allows one to see clearly that various pages of the manuscript have been damaged by fire, water and handling.
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