Tolkien was right: Scholars conclude Beowulf likely the work of single author

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

by Tomte • 7 years ago

301 93 7 years ago

arstechnica.com

elfakyn• 7 years ago

I doubt this would get as much media attention if Tolkien wasn't involved.

openredbull• 7 years ago

I disagree. Beowulf is a staple of English literature, and a well-known poem for many.

sneakernets• 7 years ago

Ah, never miss an opportunity to turn a positive and engaging story into a cynical jab against society.

rgrieselhuber2• 7 years ago

It’s always low karma, anonymous accounts. There seem to be a bunch of them recently.

Mediterraneo102• 7 years ago

Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf two decades got quite a bit of attention in mainstream magazines and newspapers. Plus, 2007 saw a film adaptation of Beowulf directed by Robert Zemeckis and written by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary. There is public interest in this poem as a classic of English literature even when Tolkien is not involved.

krapp7• 7 years ago

Plus, 2007 saw a film adaptation of Beowulf directed by Robert Zemeckis and written by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary.

That film would likely not have happened if not for the success of the Lord of the Rings films, and most people likely never heard of Beowulf until then, unless they dimly remembered having to read it in class once.

And no translation of anything, much less any book without a big media tie in, gets anything close to "quite a bit of attention" in the mainstream press. Coverage in literature sections of the newspapers or dedicated literary sites are far from mainstream.

And this is an article in Ars Technica, which to HN may seem mainstream, but which is far from it for the masses. A quick Google of "Tolkein Beowulf single author" brings up little in the way of mainstream coverage, with the Ars article being on top.

Don't get me wrong, I love Beowulf and Seamus Heaney's translation is one of the few books I'll reread regularly, but elfakyn is correct. If Tolkein's name weren't involved, no one would be covering this at all, and really, almost no one is now.

scottlocklin4• 7 years ago

Heaney's translation is bloody awful too.

Reading a chunk of Beowulf in the original was, along with learning Maxwell's equations and reading Gibbon one of the best things I ever did for myself. It's ... fairly obvious it's one person. The latter half with the dragon could have been an add-on.

hinkley• 7 years ago

And there is also The 13th warrior, a screen adaptation of Michael Crichton’s ode to Beowulf, called Eaters of the Dead.

walshemj• 7 years ago

Tolkien was well know as one of the leading scholars in Norse literature before he wrote the LOTR

iguy• 7 years ago

And IIRC was largely responsible for getting people to read Beowulf in particular as literature. I mean to appreciate the work of art, as opposed to dissecting it as evidence about language etc.

labster• 7 years ago

Beowulf is English literature though.

SiVal• 7 years ago

I think this claim is true in its explicit sense. The Tolkien connection makes an interesting story even more interesting, which probably increases media attention by some non-zero value.

But it would be an interesting story for many of us without the Tolkien connection. Beowulf is an important artifact in the history of the language many of us are deeply attached to. And better than a potsherd, this artifact literally speaks to us from the distant past (literal if you consider writing of this sort to be a form of speech, as I do.) If the claim is implying that most of the coverage is due to the Tolkien angle, and it would have little to no coverage without it, I believe that to be incorrect. But I don't know if that is what was meant, and the explicit interpretation of the claim is probably correct.

libraryatnight4• 7 years ago

Beowulf is required reading for many many students, when I worked in book stores students came in every new semester from all levels of schooling to buy either the Heaney or Raffel translations - so I think it's probably interesting to more people than you think.

rhokstar• 7 years ago

"Across many of the proposed breaks in the poem, we see that these measures are homogeneous," said Krieger. "So as far as the actual text of Beowulf is concerned, it doesn't act as though there is supposed to be a major stylistic change at these breaks. The absence of major stylistic shifts is an argument for unity."

I'm imaging this methodology applied across many other literary works. So many insights can be generated throughout the ages!

bhritchie• 7 years ago

And have been! Careful attention to stylistic features has allowed us to get a pretty good idea of the chronological groupings of Plato's dialogues, for example, which helps us understand things like how his views evolved over time. That's a typical sort of use of stylometry.

TheGRS• 7 years ago

Have they applied this to Homer? That was another one I understood was supposedly multiple authors.

ehsankia• 7 years ago

What about Shakespeare, doesn't he have one of the most extensive authorship research? The article quickly mentions that an older analysis mistakenly attributed someone's poem to Shakespeare, to me, that only adds to the mystery of the authorship question.

N_trglctc_joe• 7 years ago

Homer's a bit of an unusual case. The Illiad was the first written work produced after a long dark age (or close to it; I'm not sure where the consensus is right now on whether Hesiod came earlier), so Homer was drawing on a few centuries of pent-up oral tradition from a culture that had itinerant hostorian-poets. As such, he probably didn't compose all his own verses but could well have been the first to write them down. I'm not sure how effective the technique referred to in the article (stylometry) would be at teasing apart the distinction between composer-of-verse and author-of-lines.

mrb• 7 years ago

Yes they have. The authors write:

"Like Beowulf, the Greek epics Iliad and Odyssey have also generated much debate about their authorship and composition. Conventionally attributed to a single author—Homer—both works nevertheless clearly originate in a long oral tradition and show signs of considerable evolution in the course of their transmission history, including the possible influence of written versions[37,38]. Since the two Homeric epics have numerous features in common, we hypothesized that they might also have a similar pattern of sense-pauses. However, as shown in Fig. 2a, the Odyssey has a higher proportion of intraline sense-pauses relative to the Iliad. This difference suggests a slight change of compositional practice between the two Greek poems, whether due to a single poet’s stylistic evolution or natural variation across the oral tradition. "

cocochanel2• 7 years ago

What if they had style guidelines like software engineers do?

slg• 7 years ago

Has the idea that Beowulf started as an oral traditional fallen out of favor? There is no mention of that in the article and that would seem to be an obvious flaw in the study if it truly was originally told orally. There is certainly less freedom when transcribing structured verse like Beowulf compared to prose, but the transcriber is still going to have an impact. A single transcriber could therefore provide a stabilizing voice that helps mesh together a story that was originally built piece by piece.

thaumasiotes5• 7 years ago

Has the idea that Beowulf started as an oral traditional fallen out of favor?

It's hard to imagine that that idea could have fallen out of favor, given the incredibly sparse written record of the Germanic tribes. They didn't produce enough literature to have a non-oral tradition.

hadepabade• 7 years ago

we don't know because the catholic church burned or hid everything just like they would do later in mexico

dmckeon2• 7 years ago

Scholars agree that these were different scribes copying the poem, not two different poets.

Which suggests that some of the perceived homogeneity may stem from the scribal style, rather than the oral style.

kro92kfmrzz• 7 years ago

It still seems possible that could be the case. The conclusion here seems to be “one person wrote down the words that tell the overall tale.”

Does not seem to preclude it originating as a series of verbal tales.

paulific• 7 years ago

That was more or less the point of Tolkien's Lecture "The Monster and the Critics". He compared it to building a tower out rocks that came from a historical ruin. Everybody was interested in taking it apart to see where the rocks came from, but he felt it had value in considering it as a single creative work in its own right.

jdminhbg• 7 years ago

Even if originally an oral tradition, the current version could still be the work of a single author. Many of Shakespeare's plays are built on pre-existing stories/histories, but the plays as they exist now are his.

kijin2• 7 years ago

We could say the same about the Homeric epics. One does not end up producing the canonical version of an oral tradition by blindly recording whatever lyrics are circulating at the time. A great poet(s?) rearranges, reinterprets, and infuses the story with a unique perspective that can be identified as his (or theirs), even thousands of years later.

samirillian• 7 years ago

Tolkien was likely* right

SOLAR_FIELDS• 7 years ago

I read this story in the most chilling manner: the same tactics they use to perform this analysis will eventually be used to link people who anonymously post now but might say something in the future that can be linked to them using the same type of analysis used here. To phrase in another way, we have come to a point where your very prose is a digital signature.

ggggtez• 7 years ago

I keep forgetting the general public is not aware of these things.

Data is like nuclear waste. Everything you do online leaves a pattern of behavior that is unique to you. Your only saving grace is no one cares about you specifically, until they do.

salutonmundo• 7 years ago

Possible solution: run your text through a different machine translator for each account. Make minor corrections for cohesiveness.

lostlogin• 7 years ago

There are rephrasing services available, presumably for helping users plagiarise. Some are laughable bad but possible helpful, while othersare quite good. Eg: https://quillbot.com/app

https://paraphrasing-tool.com/

TheOperator• 7 years ago

This sort of analysis is older than Tolkien. There are pretty substantial processing requirements to do it at scale and it's pretty inaccurate. In the future people who say controversial things will use short sentence long statements to render this sort of analysis useless.

_nedR2• 7 years ago

This is already a thing. In fact the rumour is that the US govt discovered the identity of Bitcoin's Satoshi using this.

https://medium.com/cryptomuse/how-the-nsa-caught-satoshi-nak...

jmkni• 7 years ago

I always thought Satoshi was more than one person, if this is true it would suggest otherwise.

Xelbair• 7 years ago

https://github.com/psal/anonymouth

viko-h• 7 years ago

simple & obscure solution: google translate to another language and back to original.

eru• 7 years ago

That will add a bit of entropy, but might not be enough.

jammygit• 7 years ago

The secret to the bad grammar in spam emails?

kzrdude• 7 years ago

Aren't college students everywhere already exposed to this with every text, due to "plagiarism detection" software?

lordnacho• 7 years ago

But the whole cat and mouse game hasn't really started yet. Once people find out what the algo looks at they can try to game it. Eg if you know or looks for the same phrases like "first of all" you can stop using that. Or if it looks at specific errors you can sprinkle it in one text but not another.

stedaniels• 7 years ago

Even better, it would be trivial to write a tool that rephrased what you wrote to be anonymous or even better/worse match someone else's signature.

yogsototh• 7 years ago

It was already known that a simple Markov Chain was used to detect another author had written a chapter inside a book. It was in 2003 I think, unfortunately I cannot find a reference about this. Just to tell that Markov chains are a very basic and old ML method quite efficient for this kind of task.

nothrabannosir• 7 years ago

In 2002 a Dutch newspaper discovered newcomer Marek van der Jagt to be Arnon Grunberg, a famous Dutch writer. They sent some blind samples of various writers to a research centre in Italy, who matched the two.

https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2002/05/11/grunberg-is-van-der-jag... (2002)

cocochanel2• 7 years ago

It's already a thing, see how the FBI caught Silkroad admin. Although not in the automated fashion that you suggest, I am pretty sure the algos are already in use.

Simple_Guy• 7 years ago

Only a matter of time before AI-powered 'prose anonymiser' is developed.

Then you can just run all your naughty words through the russian styliser.

metastew• 7 years ago

Wasn't that how they caught the Unabomber? I saw a documentary about the guy who caught him by using this sort of analysis, although his method was quite analog (scanning through written letters and Unabomber's correspondences to the press).

commandar• 7 years ago

The Unabomber was turned in by his brother, who recognized some unique phrasing in the released manifesto and reported it to authorities.

EDIT:

After looking, it looks like the brother turned him in after having this sort of analysis done to confirm his suspicions. So it does look like there's a tie to the story, but the analysis wasn't done blindly in that case.

mmcwilliams• 7 years ago

Isn't this the reason the grep was created? It was used to determine which parts of the Federalist Papers were written by which author.[0]

Considering this occurred in 1974, I can only imagine that techniques for de-anonymizing authors have gotten much better due to how much written text individuals post on social media sites, like hn. Uh oh.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grep

eyerow• 7 years ago

The scholars should try this on the Book of Mormon.

thousandautumns• 7 years ago

Why? There's no point. If the results come back indicating multiple authors, great. If the results come back indicating a single author, you could just make the argument that it is the result of the book having a single translator.

Academic pursuits should have more meaning than trying to dunk on other people's belief systems when those belief systems are fairly harmless.

herewulf2• 7 years ago

You wouldn't think they are "fairly harmless" if you were a non-Mormon living in Utah.

Gunstig2Snath• 7 years ago

I always preferred Grendel by John Gardner. But if Zach Snyder directed the original with Ben Affleck as Beo.... oh, hell, I'd hate that.

Tolkien was right: Scholars conclude Beowulf likely the work of single author

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