MaJoC, I had the same issue when I was writing complicated reports or essays. I needed to print the rough draft to be able to see and evaluate the whole thing. Scrolling on a screen made it difficult to see how the written work fitted together as a complete entity, for some reason.

I didn't mind reading Beowulf, about 30 years after I had studied it, because I was concentrating on remembering how to decipher the language and luckily I knew the story well enough to put that part more in the background of my mind - focusing on the mechanics of the language more than the meaning of the whole.