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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.
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Tolkien Was Right: Scholars Conclude Beowulf Was Likely the Work of Single Author
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by c0lo on Saturday April 20 2019, @04:26AM (5 children)
YMMV in regards with the validity of the conclusion.
From TFA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(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.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by canopic jug on Saturday April 20 2019, @04:57AM (3 children)
There's an online version of Beowulf [uky.edu] of that Old English version at the University of Kentucky, albeit one poxed with javascript.
Older versions than the Nowell Codex, which itself is probably from the 10th or 11th century, weren't written down and given the style it was a spoken poem. Best guess is that it came about sometime in the 8th to 11th centuries, meaning that Beowulf was probably around quite a long time under oral tradition before it was written down and translated into Old English. So, while the oldest extant version might be in (Old) English, it is not an English poem, especially since it is about various Scandinavian tribes. The setting is Denmark, but to put it in further geographical context, Denmark was larger then. The territory that is now southern Sweden was Danish around those times [euratlas.net].
In modern times, most people probably encounter Ibsen's works via their English translations as well. However that does not make them English either.
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(Score: 5, Interesting) by coolgopher on Saturday April 20 2019, @10:15AM (2 children)
To this day, the southern part of Sweden is known as Götaland, "land of the Geats", with the Geats* being Beowulf's tribe. The country's name comes instead from what's now the middle region, known as "Svealand" ("land of the Swedes"). At some point those tribes joined and formed a kingdom, and while the Swedes got naming rights, I'd say the Geats got pronunciation rights. Why? Because the Swedish spelling of Sweden is "Sverige", which is a contraction of "Svea rige" ("the kingdom of the Swedes"). It's however pronounced with something far more akin to a Danish drawl ("sver-ye") than a self-respecting Swede would like to admit :D
*) Okay, it's not quite as clear cut as that, as much has been lost both in the mists of time and in translations. Those interested may hit up this wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] as a starting point. It's quite the rabbit hole.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Arik on Saturday April 20 2019, @04:01PM (1 child)
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?
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Sunday April 21 2019, @12:24AM
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!
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Sulla on Saturday April 20 2019, @05:03AM (3 children)
When we talk of the Odyssey or the Illiad we attribute them to Homer, but to my understanding he was the one who wrote them down (perhaps made his own touches) to oral stories that predate him. Is the writing style throughout the Odyssey / Illiad consistent with one author? Being that it came from an older oral history I imagine that the story has the voice of many different artists over time. Perhaps Homer was profound enough that in his writing of the works his own voice dominates anything that came before him.
Just because a work might not have one voice, does not mean that it was not a single anonymous author.
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(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @05:26AM
As a young person I was stunned to learn that many of my favorite rock n’roll songs were adaptations/covers of Leadbelly recordings. Get a bit older/wiser and realize that Leadbelly was probably just the first to record various “public domain” songs.
Funny how one specific person tends to get crowned as THE creator when the final product is actually based on many peoples’ effort...
(Score: 2) by hellcat on Saturday April 20 2019, @01:59PM
Legend has it that Homer was blind, so writing may not have been one of his strengths.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer#Textual_transmission [wikipedia.org]
And scholars pretty much agree that the poems were around well before they were written down.
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(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Saturday April 20 2019, @08:46PM
Typical Roman understanding of Greek history and culture, Sulla! Homer composed the poems, and they were transmitted orally by rhapsodes. They were not written down until hundreds of years later, by not-Homer people.
(Score: 2) by gringer on Saturday April 20 2019, @07:59AM (1 child)
Wow, imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @09:07AM
Cluster elements should be ideally homogeneous, this is why the beowulf looks like the work of a single author. BUT ISN'T.
(Score: 3, Touché) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday April 20 2019, @01:26PM
You could do worse than to listen to a guy so well versed in language use that he wrote several novels just to have an excuse to create his own.
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