At the heart of this book is my conception of Old English poems as what the French call lieux de mémoire, by which I mean that they furnished society in the present with memorable images, sometimes unforgettable, typifying the past. In their case, the community was aristocratic warrior society and the images consisted of narrative, orally transmitted in a distinctive combination of traditional thought and customary form. The business of this poetry was social continuity. It placed social action of the past in a general perspective in order to show its relevance in the present. It dealt with the basis of action at any time, past or present, by converting accepted perceptions of active being into narrative through language designed by convention for the purpose. The core of poetic tradition was established form which regularly implied interaction of two (or sometimes three) fundamental potentials inviting, and receiving, fulfilment in explicit narrative. Time-honoured social observation of the roots of action was exemplified in practice over a range of experience broadly corresponding to that covered by explicit maxims. Poetic narrative consistently tested accumulated wisdom about the foundations of society's integrity, and of what threatened them, in the stresses and strains of ‘real’ life. The conventions special to poetry served practical needs thematically, as distinct from the ‘defining’ function of standard formulations in other traditional oral media, such as legal processes and magical rituals. First and foremost, therefore, I concentrate on Old English poetry's primary store of generalized allusive language, working in the interests of communal stability in aristocratic warrior society.