Hacker News Reader

Comment by rhokstar | Hacker News Reader

"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!

View on HN

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.

What if they had style guidelines like software engineers do?

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

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.

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.

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. "

Reply on news.ycombinator.com