Intertextuality and Sociolectal Differentiation in Old Saxon and Old English Verse: A Stylometric Analysis Using N-grams

Abstract

This essay examines the relationship between Old Saxon and Old English poetry using computational stylometry, specifically n-gram analysis. The shared n-grams indicate that the two verse corpora are so closely related that they can be considered expressions of the same poetic language. The Old Saxon Heliand and Genesis bear greatest resemblance to the West Saxon Meters of Boethius and Genesis B. These similarities derive from the poems’ common derivation from a Saxon verse sociolect, a poetic subtradition analogous to a language dialect. There are at least two more sociolects in Old English verse, whose members correspond to the “Beowulf plus Caedmonian” works and the “Cynewulfian” poems. This is confirmed by a network analysis that treats individual Old English and Old Saxon poems as system components and models their relationship by means of a force-directed graph. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the literary histories of both poetic traditions.