Lines 81-85 of Beowulf describe how Hrothgar's hall, Heorot, is prosperous and pleasant for the time being, but a darker future is foreshadowed; a time when the hall will burn, and family feuds will lead to open war.
The opening stanza of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is an abbreviated history and genealogy lesson; it tells of how, at the end of the Trojan war, the hero Aeneas left Troy, and he and his descendants came to rule areas further and further west of Troy, beginning with the founding of Rome and ending with the establishment of Britain.
What these passages have in common is their emphasis on family connections, and their chronological context (i.e. they took place in the past and had a set of events leading up to and following them). The stories are not self-contained, but "organic" in a sense; they are products of the histories that preceded them and fed those that followed. Likewise, the emphasis on family connections points to this as a reliable source of knowledge and driving action; not only can we assume that important events will ultimately be the product of family relationships, but that we can expect "greatness" to be heritable across the generations of those families as well.
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