Oral/Arual vs. Literary Experiences

Oral pieces, such as ones like Beowulf, are quite interesting because of the fact that they have survived, at one point, almost solely by word-of-mouth. These stories survived by being passed on from generation to generation, person to person. However, things that were important to the culture at the time were also able to shine through in these pieces. They were also very dependent on things like a cyclic plot, so that the story tellers would be able to remember what the sequence of events in a story were. The only drawback to this was the fact that much can be lost during these transitions. Things like war and personal editing could very much affect the outcome of a story; things such as these make it difficult to determine what the original story could have held. Literary, pieces, are different. While they are influenced by many of the same things that Oral pieces were, it was much easier to keep tract of an original piece because of the fact that there were written down.