Bibliographic record
Abstract
The creativity of the Beowulf -poet is a byword, and it is easy to be so dazzled by the poet's artistic excellence that the mechanics of his craft are obscured. Yet the Toronto Dictionary of Old English , especially under the energetic editorship of Toni Healey, has made available precisely the tools to examine in meticulous detail what makes the Beowulf -poet's technique tick, both through the Corpus and the Dictionary itself. Complementing the DOE , another more recent project, A Consolidated Library of Anglo-Saxon , will offer a combined corpus of Old English and Anglo-Latin poetry, with complete texts and translations, and a series of interlinked databases mapping (for example) rhythm and metre; alliteration; rhyme and assonance; poetic vocabulary; hapax legomena and compounds; syntax and structure; formulas and formulaic systems; themes; parallels and echowords; direct sources; emendations and scribal corrections; and editorial variants. This essay makes extensive use of both DOE and CLASP , especially the latter's database of compounds, to demonstrate how both projects can be employed in tandem. The poet's skill is evident throughout Beowulf , but in this context it seems particularly pertinent to consider the four main descriptions of poetic performance and associated verses, spread out over more than 2,000 lines, and increasing in length ( Beowulf [hereafter Beo ] 89b–91, 867b– 74, 1063–70, and 2105–14). In each case, rather ominously occurring beforethe advent of monstrosity (the kin of Cain, Grendel, Grendel's mother, and the dragon respectively), these descriptions are tightly intertwined by verbal echoes and other parallels. The first and briefest occurs early in the poem, describing the celebration that followed the building of Heorot, a paean performed by one of Hrothgar's poets ( Beo 89b–91: here and below, parallels between relevant passages are indicated in bold italics ): Þǣr wæs hearpan swēġ , swutol sang sċopes . Sæġde sē þe cūþe frum-sċeaft fīra feorran reċċan […] There was the harmony of the harp, / the clear song of the poet. He spoke, who could / recount from far back the beginnings of men […]
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".