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posted by takyon on Saturday April 20 2019, @04:14AM   Printer-friendly
from the anonymous-grendel dept.

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.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/04/tolkien-was-right-scholars-conclude-beowulf-likely-the-work-of-single-author/


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Arik on Saturday April 20 2019, @04:01PM (1 child)

    by Arik (4543) on Saturday April 20 2019, @04:01PM (#832608) Journal
    This is the area that Beowulf (the character) had come from, iirc. And I'm not sure I buy the argument that Beowulf wasn't English originally.

    In a sense it wasn't because there wasn't any "English" as we know it at the time, of course, but there wasn't any "Danish" or "Swedish" either. Scholars call the languages at that time things like Old West Norse and Old East Norse and Old Gutnish and so on. The area where these were spoken was almost entirely pre-literate - while runes existed and were used for monuments and magic, there doesn't appear to have been much other use of them, no scholarly bodies were standardizing anything, and language was overwhelmingly verbal/aural. And these languages were still very closely related and not isolated from each other. In Beowulf, you see this, and I don't think it's poetic license. There's no real linguistic barrier in Scandinavia at the time, just a patchy gradient of dialects.

    And Danmark wasn't the same - while Skåne and Halland were Danish at this time, Jutland was... complicated. The Jutes lived in the north of the peninsula, and their association with the Danish kingdom goes way back, but their original language isn't really known. Might have been a form of Norse, or might have been Ingvaeonic. The south of the peninsula (Old Saxony, later Schleswig and Holstein) was held by Saxons, and they were definitely Ingvaeonic, and around the area where the western shore of Jutland intersects with the continent were the Angles - also definitely Ingvaeonic.

    But even here, where modern scholars interject not just a distinction of language but of different language families - they're still very closely related families. And they're connected in this North Sea Sprachbund going all the way back into the mists of the early migration period if not before. So they're still remarkably similar languages - so similar, in fact, I dare say they were again likely to have been perceived at the time as mere dialects, accents, drawls, a strange word here and there - but still it was possible to talk enough to trade, and if you moved you could probably expect to master the local dialect quickly.

    It's a little strange to wrap your head around, because we use these biological analogies to describe language, but language isn't like sexual reproduction. You don't create a new language by giving two young languages that are deeply in love some time and space. Languages don't have parents, not exactly. They change over time in messier ways than that. Internal drift, external influence, etc.

    So anyway, the English we speak today descends from the language(s) of the people who settled in Britain, arriving from all across this North Sea Sprachbund but primarily from greater Jutland. Hence "the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes" of the chronicles. Their dialects, or languages if you prefer, coalesced in a few centuries into the Old English we know today.

    Which I guess is kind of a longwinded way of getting around to the idea that wherever Beowulf was originally composed, it would have probably been understandable in its original form all the way from Svealand to Ænglia. I've been told by Icelanders that they could read Beowulf without needing a translation, just a note here and there for the odd thing that wasn't readily understandable.

    That being the case, there was no need to 'translate' it - even if it wasn't composed somewhere in greater Jutland to begin with.

    --
    If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
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  • (Score: 2) by coolgopher on Sunday April 21 2019, @12:24AM

    by coolgopher (1157) on Sunday April 21 2019, @12:24AM (#832792)

    Two things really stood out to me when I came across Beowulf. The first was an astonishment that I'd never been introduced to it in school. The Snorri eddas are all nice and good, but here is history/legend from my region, and it doesn't even get a mention?! Because it's in Old English rather than Old Norse?!

    The second was, as you already brought up, the utterly pleasant surprise that I could read it and understand much if it. Thoughts from a millenium ago, reaching me in a world utterly foreign to the author(s). How friggen cool is that!