The article is devoted to the current issue of pragmalinguistiс research in the verbal communication in historical texts. The study of the epistemic utterances with the Old English verbs ‘sculan’ and ‘willan’ in the context of the Anglo-Saxon poem «Beowulf» was attempted with the aim to feature their structural, semantic and pragmatic aspects relevant for the perception of the specific contents and ideological constituents of the epic-heroic discourse. Special attention is paid to the contextual analysis of the shades of modal semantics and context-discourse meanings of the verbs ‘sculan’ and ‘willan’ used as markers of epistemic utterances presented as the speech acts of assertion, prediction and supposition. The study showed both similarity and difference in the rendered functional senses as affecting the context pragmatics of an epistemic utterance.