Large-scale quantitative profiling of the Old English verse tradition

• Published in: Nature human behaviour 2019-06, Vol.3 (6), p.560-567
• Main Authors: Neidorf, Leonard, Krieger, Madison S., Yakubek, Michelle, Chaudhuri, Pramit, Dexter, Joseph P.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 4007/4010; 4014/4009; 639/705/1042; Authorship; Behavioral Sciences; Biomedical and Life Sciences; Cultural change; Data Mining - methods; England; English literature; Experimental Psychology; History, Medieval; Humans; Letter; Life Sciences; Linguistics - methods; Literary history; Literature, Medieval - history; Microeconomics; Models, Theoretical; Natural Language Processing; Neurosciences; Personality and Social Psychology; Philology; Poetry; Poetry as Topic - history; Profiles; Quantitative analysis; Segmentation; Traditions; Usefulness
• ISSN: 2397-3374; 2397-3374
• DOI: 10.1038/s41562-019-0570-1

The corpus of Old English verse is an indispensable source for scholars of the Indo-European tradition, early Germanic culture and English literary history. Although it has been the focus of sustained literary scholarship for over two centuries, Old English poetry has not been subjected to corpus-wide computational profiling, in part because of the sparseness and extreme fragmentation of the surviving material. Here we report a detailed quantitative analysis of the whole corpus that considers a broad range of features reflective of sound, metre and diction. This integrated examination of fine-grained features enabled us to identify salient stylistic patterns, despite the inherent limitations of the corpus. In particular, we provide quantitative evidence consistent with the unitary authorship of Beowulf and the Cynewulfian authorship of Andreas , shedding light on two longstanding questions in Old English philology. Our results demonstrate the usefulness of high-dimensional stylometric profiling for fragmentary literary traditions and lay the foundation for future studies of the cultural evolution of English literature. Neidorf et al. analyse the style of all surviving Old English poetry. They find quantitative evidence that a single author composed Beowulf and that the poem Andreas was written by Cynewulf—two longstanding questions of English literary history.