Submitted via IRC for ErkleLives
The epic poem Beowulf is the most famous surviving work of Old English literature. For decades, scholars have hotly debated both when the poem was composed and whether it was the work of a single anonymous author ("the Beowulf poet"). Lord of the Rings' scribe J.R.R. Tolkien was among those who famously championed the single-author stance. Now researchers at Harvard University have conducted a statistical analysis and concluded that there was very likely just one author, further bolstering Tolkien's case. They published their findings in a recent paper [DOI: 10.1038/s41562-019-0570-1] [DX] in Nature Human Behavior.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @04:47AM
Stylometry can't work for Beowulf since we have so few Old English texts overall that we can't differentiate style from idiomatic or localized usage.
Homer's works had a similar problem until recent decades when archeological findings confirmed, eliminated and expanded certain theories regarding antiquity Greek that when applied to Homer showed a shift in styles mid way correlated to the changes in the language.