Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Beowulf single-authorship claim is unsupported

  • Matters Arising
  • Published:

From Nature Human Behaviour

View current issue Submit your manuscript

Matters Arising to this article was published on 11 November 2021

The Original Article was published on 08 April 2019

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

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).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  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).

Download references

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
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Andrew Cooper
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Benjamin Nagy
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Artjoms Šeļa
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

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.

Reporting Summary

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

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

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01222-5

  • Springer Nature Limited

This article is cited by

Search

Navigation