Authorship

Who wrote Beowulf?
Look for stylistic changes –
a single author?

Beowulf is one of the most well-known examples of Old English literature and debate has raged over whether the poem was written by a single author or combined from multiple sources. New research by Neidorf et al (2019) lends support to the single author theory.

Beowulf survives in a single manuscript that has been dated to around AD 1000. Using a statistical approach called stylometry the researchers analysed features of the writing, comparing the poem’s metre, word choices, letter combinations and sense pauses – small pauses between clauses and sentences. They found no evidence for any major stylistic shifts across the poem suggesting that Beowulf is the work of a single author.

Original research: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0570-1

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