In a provocative take on Germanic heroic poetry, Taranu reads texts like Beowulf, Maldon, and the Waltharius as embodying alternative modes of history-writing that functioned in a larger ecology of narrative forms including Latinate Christian history and Biblical epic. These modes employed the conceit of their participating in a tradition of oral verse for a variety of purposes, from political propaganda to constructing origin myths for early medieval nationalism and heroic masculinity. The more sophisticated of these historical visions actively meditated on its own relationship to historicity and fictionality while doing sophisticated (and often subversive) cultural and socio-emotional work for its audiences. By taking this approach, Vernacular Verse Histories in Early Medieval England and Franciarecovers a part of the wide array of forms through which medieval communities made sense of their past and the richly varied understandings of truthfulness and witness that counted as history.