Case Study, Re-visualized

Sara Waldorf’s master’s thesis at Signum University was built on a painstaking log of every use of the dative case in 2,000 lines of Beowulf. It’s entitled a “Case Study”, which is a joke so bad that Idiosophers have to salute. She gave a talk about this research in a “Thesis Theater” webcast at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRhQHjIHSRQ.

Her thesis (available through the Signum U Library) contains the line, “The spreadsheet of dative categories could provide raw data for loading into a more sophisticated database.” Let’s take her up on that and see what we can do. Note: this post will contain no pie charts. They’re just empty calories.

It’s infuriating for the student but interesting for the philologist that grammatical cases are decaying during the Early Middle Ages. The obscure cases like locative and ablative were all collapsing into the dative case. The core of Sara’s work is unpacking these, leading to a classification of every dative into one of the 22 ways Old English used that case. Here’s what she found in these 2000 lines.  Locative is on a line by itself because it’s by far the dominant function. The vestigial instrumental case, explicitly taught in the intro class, is almost completely gone from this sample.

Before and after the scribal change (click to embiggen).

Figures 4 & 5 in the thesis use pie charts to look at use of the dative in the 50 lines before and after the change of scribe.  Here’s how I see them.  As the thesis notes, there’s a huge difference. I’ve added the overall frequency chart for comparison. This enables us to see that the extraordinary case is the first scribe, who uses a lot of locatives. The second is much closer to the average for the whole selection.

The thing I liked best about Sara’s work (apart from the staggering labor of counting nouns and pronouns already being done for me) is how she split the selection up into separate stories. Beowulf is episodic. The way the poet talks changes with the material he’s talking about. This shows up in the dative-case usage. The stories in this sample are: the fight with Grendel’s Mother, the feast afterward, Beowulf’s departure from Heorot, Beowulf’s recap and prophecy about Freawaru’s marriage, presentation of gifts to Hygelac, the fight with the dragon, and Beowulf’s life in review.  As good followers of Michael Drout, we should begin with a dendrogram: if we look at the fraction of all the datives in each episode that are of each type and cluster the episodes accordingly, they look like this. (complete-link cluster in 22 dimensions, four of which are boring)

Relationships of episodes by dative use

Among the seven episodes, there are three closely-related pairs. The gift-giving passage stands alone. Unlike the others, it’s loaded with indirect objects (without whom gift-giving is pointless).

The next step is to look at the density of various kinds of usage. Locatives are heavily concentrated in the first half of Beowulf’s departure. The scribal change is marked with a little orange dash in the middle of the departure episode. This is what we saw in the bar graphs above. The change appears to be due to the needs of the narrative more than the style of the scribe. The second scribe quickly returns to a locative pattern familiar from earlier episodes. Besides, had we used 100-line chunks instead of 50, the differences would have been minimal.

The dendrogram tells us that the Feast and Prophecy episodes are similar, but it doesn’t say how. Here we can see that they both start with some locative scene-setting, after which the need for locatives drops off. Grendel’s mother and Beowulf’s life in review trend the opposite way: few locatives at the beginning, but a double hump of them at the end.  The gift section looks nothing like the others.

Density of locative datives

Indirect Object density

The deepest troughs of locatives correspond with peaks of two other common usages. (Naturally — you can’t have more than one or two datives per line, so when one type increases, the others must decrease.)

As we mentioned, the Gift-giving episode has lots of indirect objects. They fill in the trough around line 2175. The Departure and Dragon episodes, which didn’t look alike in the Locative graph, seem much more similar here.

The other low-locative part of the poem is at the beginning of the disagreement with Grendel’s mother.  Those lines are full of Datives of Means. (A dative of means is like herebyrne  hondum gebróden,”byrnie braided by hands” in line 1443.)

Density of means

There is a moderate surge in datives of means toward the end. I was expecting that to be inflated by pairs of nouns: wigum ond waépnum in line 2395, for example. (He supported the son of Ohtere with warriors and weapons.) But Sara knew that was coming, and only counted such doublets once. These peaks indicate many successive sentences using datives of means.

The densities of the other 19 uses of the Old English dative are less obvious in their meaning, but are available for consultation here: DativeDensity

Conclusion

I shall not pretend that the motivation of this study is anything other than, “Someone made a database — let’s look and see what’s in it!” Sara’s conclusion relates to the transition during the Anglo-Saxon period from inflection to preposition as a way to indicate the dative functions in an English sentence. My interests lie rather in seeing the ebb and flow of grammatical structures in response to the narrative. I would have expected each of the episodes to begin with a burst of locatives. (“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”) It’s interesting that most of these don’t. Though the poem as a whole begins with a burst of datives, they’re temporal and accompaniment; none are locative.

The “agglomerated dative” offers one way to quantify the presence of grammatical structures in the poem. Whether it can be expanded to yield new insights into the perennial questions about Beowulf remains to be seen.

References

Drout, Michael. Tradition and influence in Anglo-Saxon literature: An evolutionary, cognitivist approach. Springer, 2013.

Waldorf, Sara J. “A ‘Case-Study’: Functions of the dative in Beowulf lines 1439-2439”. Signum University, 2019.