The Old English poem Beowulf is about memory. The poem is found in the late-tenth-century MS BL Cotton Vitellius A.XV manuscript and is set in the sixth-century Scandinavian homelands from where the people who became the Anglo-Saxons had migrated in the fifth century. It is a cultural myth, a remembered story which endures because it continues to exert a hold over people’s imagination in its continuing capacity to absorb and interpret experience. As Nicholas Howe writes, ‘[a]s it survives organically within a culture and inspires its imaginative works, this myth testifies to the belief that the past can shape the present and, by extension, the future.’

The tradition of transmitting stories of the past through oral poetry was important for an early society with no written records. Indeed, it provided continuity, a way for people to understand themselves against those who had gone before them. It gave them models for the organization of their society and a benchmark by which to live: a benchmark which Matthew Innes terms ‘an image of an ideal order, a Golden Age against which the present could be judged’. Howe also interprets this as ‘an account of that ancestral past which, despite any evidence to the contrary, gives a group its irreducible common identity’. The very act of passing on this story/history was in itself an act of memory by the scops [poets], who undertook the responsibility of remembering and transmitting their society’s identity through time, complete with successes and failures. Whilst transmitting this memory, they also had the opportunity, consciously or subconsciously, to add their own agenda and interpretation with the changing times. As memory is by its very nature organic and subjective, each time a memory is transmitted, there is a possibility that it may be given a subjective slant capable of being used to change the way society reacts to events from its past and its present. In the context of Beowulf, that memory, therefore, would acquire some stability only when written down; even then, with each copy made there may have been subtle changes. As this is the only extant version of the poem, however, we have no way of comparing it to others.