Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • Matters Arising
  • Published:

Reply to: Beowulf single-authorship claim is unsupported

Nature Human Behaviour volume 5, pages 1484–1486 (2021)Cite this article

Subjects

The Original Article was published on 11 November 2021

replying to P. Plecháč et al. Nature Human Behaviour https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01222-5 (2021)

Plecháč et al.1 question the validity and reproducibility of key claims in our computational study of Old English poetry2. Although our paper considers many aspects of the verse tradition, almost all of their objections centre on our discussion of stylistic homogeneity in Beowulf. Here we argue that Plecháč et al.’s critique depends on selective interpretation of statistical evidence and, even more crucially, idiosyncrasies in the handling of Old English philology. Furthermore, we find that their analysis provides independent confirmation of several of our primary results.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Buy this article

  • Purchase on Springer Link
  • Instant access to full article PDF
Buy now

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Fig. 1: Heat map of the fraction difference between the prior distributions from our original study and the re-analysis of Plecháč et al.
Fig. 2: Replication of figure 2 of Plecháč et al. following fuller normalization of orthographic differences in Beowulf.

Data availability

The normalized version of Klaeber’s Beowulf is available from the authors on request. All other datasets are freely and publicly available at https://github.com/qcrit.

Code availability

All custom code is freely and publicly available at https://github.com/qcrit.

References

  1. Plecháč, P., Cooper, A., Nagy, B. & Šeļa, A. Beowulf single-authorship claim is unsupported. Nat. Hum. Behav. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01222-5 (2021).

  2. Neidorf, L., Krieger, M., Yakubek, M., Chaudhuri, P. & Dexter, J. Large-scale quantitative profiling of the Old English verse tradition. Nat. Hum. Behav. 3, 560–567 (2019).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Sturluson, S. & Faulkes, A. Prose Edda (Everyman Classics, 1987).

  4. Drout, M., Kisor, Y., Smith, L., Dennett, A. & Piirainen, N. Beowulf Unlocked: New Evidence from Lexomic Analysis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

  5. Drout, M. D., Kahn, M. J., LeBlanc, M. D. & Nelson, C. Of dendrogrammatology: lexomic methods for analyzing relationships among Old English poems. J. Engl. Germanic Philol. 110, 301–336 (2007).

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

We thank D. Donoghue for his contributions to the section on metre, especially in alerting us to the passage of S. Sturluson, and M. Drout for providing us with the normalized version of Klaeber’s Beowulf.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Madison S. Krieger

  2. Department of Classics, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

    Pramit Chaudhuri

  3. Data Science Initiative and Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Joseph P. Dexter

Authors
  1. Madison S. Krieger
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Pramit Chaudhuri
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Joseph P. Dexter
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Contributions

M.S.K., P.C. and J.P.D. designed the study, performed the study, analysed the results and wrote the manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Madison S. Krieger or Joseph P. Dexter.

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 Ratio of intraline to total sense-pauses for the partition of Beowulf, the mean of all texts in the Old English verse corpus, some salient individual texts, and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.

The error bar for the corpus mean denotes one s.d. of the ratios for all of the texts. This figure is a replication of figure 2a in our original paper with the correct texts for Genesis A and Genesis B. Beo., Beowulf; Gen., Genesis; K&D, Krapp and Dobbie.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Histograms of fraction difference in slope for hapax compounds for 1,000 binary partitions of Beowulf and five other texts (Exodus, Elene, Juliana, Christ and Satan, and Andreas).

Note that the horizontal scale differs between histograms. Beowulf appears markedly more homogeneous than the comparison texts.

Extended Data Fig. 3 Sample data for the orthographic normalization of Beowulf.

A large number of alterations is needed to normalize spelling between the two scribal hands. The table shows the changes required for the first 100 lines of the poem; a complete list of changes is available from the authors on request.

Supplementary information

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Krieger, M.S., Chaudhuri, P. & Dexter, J.P. Reply to: Beowulf single-authorship claim is unsupported. Nat Hum Behav 5, 1484–1486 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01223-4

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01223-4

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing AI and Robotics

Sign up for the Nature Briefing: AI and Robotics newsletter — what matters in AI and robotics research, free to your inbox weekly.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing: AI and Robotics