Beowulf and the Psychohistory of Anglo-Saxon Culture*

þæt is fyrnsægen, hu he weorna fela wita geðolode, heardra hilda, in þære hæðenan byrig.

Only relatively recently, in the last ten or twelve years, have scholars come to recognize the encoding, preservation, and transmission of culturally useful information as the basic function of the traditional oral epic. Eric Havelock has described the operation of the Homeric data retrieval system in the following terms:

…poetry is central in the educational theory. It occupied this position so it seems in contemporary society, and it was a position held apparently not on the grounds that we would offer, namely poetry's inspirational and imaginative effects, but on the ground that it provided a massive repository of useful knowledge, a sort of encyclopedia of ethics, politics, history, and technology which the effective citizen was required to learn as the core of his educational equipment. Poetry represented not something we call by that name, but an indoctrination which today would be comprised in a shelf of text books and works of reference.1

At the factual level, we may pore over extant “volumes” of the Homeric encyclopedia in, for example, the Iliadic “Catalog of Ships” or the Odyssean raft-building manual; we can carry