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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

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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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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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