A new kind of 'Beowulf': Text, translation and technology

This study is an exploration of Beowulf-using two sophisticated textual analysis programs, Crawdad and In-Spire, to discover new information about the poem, its organization, and its place within the broad range of Old English poetry. With the support of computer-aided textual analysis, I examine portions of the text of Beowulf in relation to each other and to other Old English poems to determine the similarities and differences among them, arguing that the correlations found by the software provide real evidence that can be used in the critical examination of the texts.; Crawdad and In-Spire use versions of Principal Components Analysis on texts to find the central themes and to examine their relationships between each other, and both produce their results in cluster analysis format. In this dissertation, I apply these programs first to a translation of Beowulf and then to the Old English Beowulf text in several different forms: the entire poem, the poem broken into its constituent fitts, the poem broken into digressive and non-digressive text, and the poem broken into thirty-two 100-line segments; I also edit the Old English segments to create versions of Beowulf that contain different word-frequency strata and apply the programs to those texts. Finally, in the latter portions of this project, I turn the analysis toward other Old English texts, each of which has been edited as outlined above, including Genesis A & B, Guthlac A & B, Andreas, Elene, Judith, Exodus, Phoenix, Christ and Satan and others. This stage of the analysis serves both as a test of the programs and as a test of the conclusions about Beowulf drawn from the software. It provides evidence that confirms the traditional groupings of Old English texts into three major periods, but this same evidence raises substantial questions about the appropriate placement of Beowulf within those periods.; The study concludes that textual analysis software can play a significant role in the critical analysis of Old English literature, and it presents a call for further study using these and other computer-assisted methods in the future.