Most people have probably heard about the childhood game "Telephone," where a phrase or sentence is passed along from person to person and is eventually changed. What some people do not realize is the connection it can have to oral histories and epics. Just like telephone, these stories may change over time and can even change in the written form.

The earliest methods used to convey the history of a time and place were oral histories, often in the form of a story or parable. Beowulf is an example of this and "The Battle at Finnsburg," a story within Beowulf, includes foreshadowing, alliteration, and other literary features. One interesting aspect of the Finn story is that it may have been missing in the first versions of Beowulf. Often, if a scop could not remember what came next in the story, he would go off on a side tangent...