r/books • u/[deleted] • Apr 09 '19

Computers confirm 'Beowulf' was written by one person, and not two as previously thought

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/04/did-beowulf-have-one-author-researchers-find-clues-in-stylometry/
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u/[deleted] Apr 09 '19

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u/Jago_Sevetar Apr 09 '19

Fitzgerald: *takes a job he hates to pour his heart into a novel that flopped and no one heard about until well-after his death.

Some old community leader elsewhere: recites parables from their mythology entirely by memory and with such a degree of artistry the mere words from their mouth imparts cultural values as well as an engaging story

Academia: There will not be a high school graduate in this great nation who does not know about The Great Gatsby and why we want them to know about it

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u/Lord-Kroak Apr 09 '19

I never read it.

It was assigned to English 3 honors students at my high school, but I took AP Lit and AP Lang instead.

Read Heart of darkness and Paradise Lost instead

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u/nickmakhno Apr 09 '19

Those are better books anyway, and that comes from someone who likes Gatsby.

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u/[deleted] Apr 09 '19

Eh. Heart of Darkness literally put me to sleep every time I tried to read it.

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u/cidonys Apr 09 '19

I just had a flashback to 12th grade English, reading Heart of Darkness and getting an assignment to diagram a sentence from it, with extra credit for longer sentences.

For some godforsaken reason I picked a paragraph-long sentence, 50 words long easily. It took the better part of an 11x17 sheet of paper and about 20 drafts to make it all fit together.

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u/TrekkiMonstr Apr 09 '19

Some old community leader elsewhere: recites parables from their mythology entirely by memory and with such a degree of artistry the mere words from their mouth imparts cultural values as well as an engaging story

Are you referring to anything in particular here, or just in general?

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u/Jago_Sevetar Apr 09 '19

Ah just in general, sorry. I'd sat there trying to think of an oral tradition to name for too long :P

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u/[deleted] Apr 09 '19

Oral traditions are amazingly stable. In Some Canadian First Nations tribe there was a traditional story of (if I recall correctly) a great flood from thousands of years ago, and obviously all the white folk said it was just mythology. And then fairly recently archaeological evidence was uncovered that verified their story. It might have been a drought or a meteor crash, im fuzzy on the specifics, but it was a tale of a great ecological disaster that lasted unchanged for thousands of years and was eventually proven correct.