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Beowulf single-authorship claim is unsupported

Nature Human Behaviour volume 5, pages 1481–1483 (2021)Cite this article

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Matters Arising to this article was published on 11 November 2021

The Original Article was published on 08 April 2019

arising from L. Neidorf et al. Nature Human Behaviour https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0570-1 (2019)

Neidorf et al.’s quantitative stylometric profile of Old English verse1 used several methods. Their study supports the unitary authorship of Beowulf and Cynewulfian authorship of Andreas, on the basis of the ostensible homogeneity of a variety of features. The authors provided full access to their code and data, which demonstrates a praiseworthy commitment to open and replicable science. However, we argue that the methods presented are unsuitable for their purposes. Our replication study uses their unmodified data and text preprocessing steps, identifies errors in their analyses, questions the reliability of their results and shows marked stylistic heterogeneity in Beowulf.

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Fig. 1: Full-line pattern variation.
Fig. 2: Hierarchical agglomerative clustering of overlapping samples of 300 lines from Beowulf based on 25 and 100, 150, 200, … , 1,000 most frequent character 2-, 3-, 4- and 5-grams.

Data availability

The data necessary to reproduce the analyses are provided at https://github.com/versotym/beowulf.

Code availability

The complete set of analysis code is available at https://github.com/versotym/beowulf, allowing all the analyses to be fully examined.

References

  1. Neidorf, L., Krieger, M. S., Yakubek, M., Chaudhuri, P. & Dexter, J. P. Large-scale quantitative profiling of the Old English verse tradition. Nat. Hum. Behav. 3, 560–567 (2019).

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  2. Sievers, E. Altgermanische Metrik (Niemeyer, 1983).

  3. Kendall, C. B. The Metrical Grammar of Beowulf (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991).

  4. Stockwell, R. P. & Minkova, D. in A Beowulf Handbook (eds Bjork, R. E. & Niles, J. D.) 55–85 (Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1997).

  5. Golston, C. in Versatility in Versification (eds Dewey, T. K. & Frog) 105–122 (Peter Lang, 2009).

  6. Fabb, N. What is Poetry?: Language and Memory in the Poems of the World (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015).

  7. Cooper, A. Unified Account of the Old English Metrical Line. PhD thesis, Stockholm Univ. (2017).

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Author information

Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Petr Plecháč, Andrew Cooper, Benjamin Nagy, Artjomas Šeļa.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Czech Literature, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic

    Petr Plecháč

  2. Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

    Andrew Cooper

  3. University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia

    Benjamin Nagy

  4. Institute of Polish Language, Polish Academy of Sciences, Krakow, Poland

    Artjoms Šeļa

  5. University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia

    Artjoms Šeļa

Authors
  1. Petr Plecháč
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  2. Andrew Cooper
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  3. Benjamin Nagy
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  4. Artjoms Šeļa
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Contributions

P.P., A.C., B.N. and A.Š. designed the study. P.P. and B.N. wrote the code. All authors analysed the results and wrote the manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Petr Plecháč, Andrew Cooper, Benjamin Nagy or Artjoms Šeļa.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Additional information

Peer review information Nature Human Behaviour thanks Michael Drout and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Half-line pattern variation.

Relative proportions of each pattern, taken over a 200-line rolling window throughout the text. The horizontal line shows the start of the disputed section.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Usage of hapax compounds.

a. Difference between slopes for two samples of Elene is comparable to the difference reported between Genesis A and B in supplementary figure 4 of the original article (sample 1: slope = 31.25; r = 0.9792; sample 2: slope = 22.67; r = 0.9798). b. When Elene, Genesis B and Phoenix are merged together, the quality of linear fit is comparable to that of Beowulf (slope = 28.05; r = 0.9983). Merging together Genesis A and Andreas produces a good quality fit as well (slope = 23.88; r = 0.9972).

Extended Data Fig. 3 Shared compounds.

Replication of original figure 3 with Christ I and Christ III added to the chart. Despite the fact that Christ I, II, III are claimed to be written by different authors, their mutual correlations do not significantly differ from those of poems signed by Cynewulf (t(7) = 0.19; p = 0.8567). This suggests that the method is sensitive to a common topic and as such cannot be accepted as “further support for unitary composition” of Beowulf.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Fig. 1 and Discussion.

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Plecháč, P., Cooper, A., Nagy, B. et al. Beowulf single-authorship claim is unsupported. Nat Hum Behav 5, 1481–1483 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01222-5

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