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

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

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

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genera1
To add additional entropy, you can do, multiple passes, use different sets of
languages every time you write or even use different translator than GT

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gpderetta
Fun fact of the day: Galactic Pothealer (written in 1969 by PKD) starts with
the protagonist doing exactly this to play a game.

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slg
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.

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kro92kfmrzz
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.

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paulific
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.

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kijin
It's also the kind of idea that Tolkien was in a unique position to entertain.
If one man can create an entire mythology spanning The LOTR, The Hobbit, and
The Silmarillion, there is no reason to suppose that another man cannot
achieve a similar feat with the Beowulf.

According to the article, doubts about single authorship began to be raised in
the 19th century. This was a time when a lot of people thought that they were
living at the pinnacle of history, and that cultures of the distant past must
have been strictly inferior to the modern one. Troy could not have possibly
existed; no single person in such a barbaric age could possibly have produced
great poems like the Homeric epics -- or Beowulf.

Well, we found Troy. We also found evidence of great devastation at Troy right
around the time when the Homeric war supposedly took place. It seems that
people of the distant past did possess the ability to tell a great story after
all, moving freely between history and mythology, filled with allegory and
philosophical depth. Just like Tolkien did, but hundreds or even thousands of
years earlier.

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rhokstar
"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!

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

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mrb
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._ "

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eyerow
The scholars should try this on the Book of Mormon.

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thousandautumns
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.

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

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samirillian
Tolkien was likely* right

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Gunstig2Snath
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.

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

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Mediterraneo10
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.

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krapp
>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.

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Mediterraneo10
> That film would likely not have happened if not for the success of the Lord
> of the Rings films

That particular film may not have been made, but it’s not hard to imagine an
adaptation being made by someone even in the absence of the _Lord of the
Rings_ trilogy. Michael Crichton’s _Eaters of the Dead_ , which riffs on the
_Beowulf_ story, got a film adaptation (as _The Thirteen Warrior_ ) in 1999.
The _Beowulf_ story isn’t _The Dream of the Rood_ or other esoteric Old
English literature; it has adventure elements that will attract ordinary
audiences from time to time.

> Coverage in literature sections of the newspapers or dedicated literary
> sites are far from mainstream.

Literature sections of mainstream newspapers _are_ mainstream reporting, even
if many readers are going to skip over those columns. And are you seriously
arguing that mags like e.g. _The New Yorker_ or _The New York Review of Books_
are not mainstream? Those may be bought by a certain demographic of bookish
people, but those mags are sold at ordinary newsagents. They are not
specialist journals.

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krapp
>And are you seriously arguing that mags like e.g. The New Yorker or The New
York Review of Books are not mainstream?

Maybe. Most people read neither nowadays. Unless my understanding of the
definition of "mainstream" is flawed, that makes them essentially niche
publications.

But that wasn't actually my argument. My argument is that most people don't
care about literature beyond anything not tied into a popular media franchise,
non-literary books or books by famous authors, and Beowulf is none of those
things.

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dwringer
Whether "most people ... care about [it as] literature", I'm not sure, but
most people in many school districts and universities were at least forced to
read Beowulf as part of a standard curriculum, possibly more than once over
the years. Isn't the question merely whether they would've cared enough to
upvote or comment on the HN posting without seeing "Tolkien" in the headline?
Beowulf is part of what one might call literary canon. What constitutes a
literary canon is always going to be subject to debate, as it is ultimately
subjective at some level. How one is to define "popular" media franchise,
"literary" books, or "famous" authors can only pose an even greater challenge
in forming any consensus.

