Beowulf Was Written By One Person, According to Computer Analysis

The poem has been read in classrooms around the world and has influenced countless works of literature, but the identity of the author of Beowulf remains unknown. Scholars can't agree on when exactly the anonymous poet wrote Beowulf, or on whether it was even a single person. Now, a study published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour may finally put one part of that debate to rest. After analyzing the text of the Old English epic, researchers have concluded that Beowulf is the work of one author, the Boston Globe reports.

Written a millennium ago, Beowulf follows a brave hero, the title character, as he slays beasts in Scandinavia, including a monster named Grendel and Grendel's mother. The oldest surviving manuscript dates back to roughly 1000 CE, and there are many competing theories as to its origins.

For their study, researchers from Harvard and other universities used computer algorithms to find patterns in the poem. A type of literary statistic analysis called stylometry was able to break down Beowulf by a number of factors, including meter, breaks, word choice, and the prevalence of certain letter combinations.

The team found that many of the distinguishing style elements of Beowulf are consistent throughout the poem, suggesting that every line came from the same source. But who that one author might have been is still unknown.

Scholars love to speculate on the true authorship of great works—even when there are famous names attached to them. Some experts think that as many as nine writers are really responsible for William Shakespeare's body of work.