Poster presentation at the Statistical Society of Canada Conference Halifax, 7-12 June 2003
A Stylometric Analysis of King Alfred’s Literary Works
Paramjit Gill
Department of Mathematics & Statistics
and
Michael Treschow
Department of English
Okanagan University College, Kelowna, BC
King Alfred the Great (848-899)
Abstract
For many centuries Alfred the Great was judged to have translated several Latin texts into Old English.
Many scholars, however, have expressed doubt whether Alfred could have done all this work. With the
availability of Old English Corpus in electronic form, it is feasible to subject the texts to statistical
stylometric analysis. We use multivariate techniques for an exploratory analysis of use of “function”
words in various Alfredian and non-Alfredian texts. We find that three translations (Pastoral Care, The
Consolation of Philosophy and The Soliloquies) that have been attributed to Alfred, indeed cluster
together on the frequency of usage of function words. However, one translation still attributed to him,
The First Fifty Prose Psalms, tends to stay away from the Alfredian texts.
Introduction
After King Alfred the Great defeated the Vikings at the battle of Edington in 878 he turned to
strengthening his English kingdom of Wessex that had suffered so greatly under the Viking invasions.
Most famous is his program for educational reform. Alfred depicts himself as a philosopher-king, taking
up scholarship in his own right and making English translations of Latin patristic texts to serve as the
basis of education in the English language. Seven translations are associated with his reign. The following
three internally identify themselves as Alfred’s work:
1. Gregory the Great's Pastoral Care
2. Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy
3. Augustine's The Soliloquies
The other four translations are:
4. Gregory the Great's Dialogues
5. Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People
6. Orosius's Histories against the Pagans
7. The First Fifty Prose Psalms
Of these four only Gregory’s Dialogues clearly identifies itself as not Alfred's work. Alfred himself
wrote its preface explaining that he directed his friends to make it. The other three do not identify any
translator, but tradition long held that they were the work of King Alfred. William of Malmesbury, a
twelfth century historian, listed Bede's History and Orosius's History among Alfred's translations and also
stated that Alfred was working on a translation of the Psalms at the time of his death. Old English
scholars, however, have come to accept that Alfred could not have translated Bede's History because, like
the translation of the Dialogues, it shows traces of the Mercian dialect. Alfred's authorship of the Orosius
has also recently been overthrown. Bately (1982) however, has argued that the translation of the First
Fifty Prose Psalms is Alfred's.
Bately assessed the authorship of the Orosius and the Prose Psalms by analysing how they translated
certain Latin words. She noted that the Prose Psalms usually used the same Old English words to translate
corresponding Latin words as did the three Alfredian texts, but that the Orosius showed greater
differentiation. Stylometry allows for a much more refined and extensive analysis, not only of contextual
words but also, and more importantly, of non-contextual words. The question now arises whether a more
thorough stylometric analysis would confirm Bately's conclusions.
As we are dealing with Old English translations from the original Latin, we face a special challenge that
does not arise in standard stylometric analysis where the problem is the authorship assignment of original
work. It is important to note, however, that the work of translation is itself a kind of authorship that can be
subjected to stylistic analysis. The translations considered in this study all stand at the beginning of Old
English prose writing. They show the initial development of English prose style. The proem to the
translation of Boethius states that Alfred's strategy of translation was variable, sometimes rendering
"word for word, sometimes sense for sense." All these translations exhibit an authorial voice that forms
the text into the Old English language.
Data
The raw data for this study were generated through the Dictionary of Old English Corpus available in
CD format from the University of Toronto. We copied the seven documents in ordinary text along with
various tags (line numbers etc.). We divided the texts into blocks of about 50 lines, each accounting for
about 1200 words on average. These blocks are the unit of statistical analysis.
Table 1. Sizes of the Texts
Total Size
(words)
77,500
Number of
Blocks
58
Mean Block Size
(words)
1340
BO: Boethius
46,200
39
1180
CP: Pastoral Care
67,650
51
1330
GD: Gregory’s Dialogues
91,000
63
1450
OR: Orosius
48,900
40
1220
SO: Soliloquies
15,400
16
960
PP: Prose Psalms
19,400
17
1140
Text
BE: Bede
Function Words
An underlying principle of statistical stylometric analysis is that writers use some common highfrequency words unreflectively in their writing. These words are called function words, and occur
regardless of context. They can be prepositions, conjunctions, articles, and common verbs. Different
authors, however, use them at different rates. Therefore, stylometric analysis can exploit differential rates
of function words to distinguish authorship.
For analysing the seven texts, we generated a list of the 100 most frequent words common to all seven
texts. We refined the list by omitting all contextual words. We further omitted all words that might
depend on the original Latin text and chose those words that were distinctively English and expressive of
English style. Table 2 shows the list of the 17 individual function words (with the modern English
meaning in parentheses) that we used for stylometric analysis. Multiple spellings for many of these words
were accounted for and combined, as in the case of ÞEAH, ÐEAH, ÞÆAH, ÐÆAH, ÞEH, ÐEH.
Table 2. Function Words
_____________________________________________________________________________________
AC (but) AND (and) BIÐ (is) EAC (also) HIT (it) IS (is) MIÐ (with) OF (of) SWA (so) TO (to)
ÐA (those, then) ÐÆS (of the) ÐÆT (that)
WÆS (was) WIÐ (against) ÐONNE (then)
ÐEAH (although)
We used WordSmith Tools (Scott, 1998) to count the frequency at which these function words occur in
text blocks. The count was then converted to frequency per 100 words in the block. Our dataset then
consists of 284 rows of text blocks and 17 columns of function words. As we see in Table 3, there is a
wide variation in the frequencies of the words over the seven texts.
Table 3. Mean Frequency of Function Words in 7 Texts
BE
BO
CP
GD
OR
SO
PP
AC
0.30
0.85
0.70
0.54
0.40
0.79
0.50
AND
6.50
3.97
3.80
5.01
5.91
3.89
7.03
BIÐ
0.10
0.74
0.77
0.22
0.06
0.25
0.44
EAC
0.51
0.35
0.48
0.58
0.33
0.42
0.40
HIT
0.17
1.06
0.87
0.72
0.52
0.96
0.24
IS
0.52
1.07
0.81
0.45
0.38
0.77
0.83
MIÐ
1.40
0.63
1.17
1.13
1.19
0.44
0.76
OF
0.48
0.21
0.24
0.54
0.41
0.20
0.41
SWA
0.94
1.45
1.31
1.30
0.86
1.77
1.16
TO
1.68
1.10
1.91
1.54
1.37
1.11
1.55
ÐA
3.68
2.76
2.75
4.13
3.11
2.62
1.73
ÐÆS
0.97
0.67
0.73
1.16
0.57
0.56
0.29
ÐÆT
2.48
4.23
3.82
3.61
3.17
4.45
1.96
ÐEAH
0.09
0.72
0.50
0.18
0.29
0.64
0.36
ÐONNE
0.27
1.44
2.02
0.41
0.49
1.15
0.62
WÆS
2.17
0.26
0.38
1.49
1.59
0.18
0.25
WIÐ
0.10
0.22
0.19
0.05
0.53
0.05
0.34
Principal Component Analysis
The first five principal components (PC’s) explain about 82% of the variability and the most prominent
function words in these PC’s are the 10 words: AND, HIT, IS, MIÐ, SWA, TO, ÐA, ÐÆT, WÆS,
ÐONNE. More importantly, the first two PC’s clearly show the separation of Alfred’s work from Bede,
Gregory’s Dialogues and Orosius (Fig 2). The most interesting revelation from Figure 2 is that Prose
Psalms stay away from Alfredian texts. This casts a doubt on Bately’s conclusion that Prose Psalms are
Alfred’s translation. Of course, we need more detailed confirmatory statistical analysis to investigate it
further.
Fig 1. Factor Loadings for the Most Prominent Words
-0.2 0.4 -0.6 0. 0.6 -0.2 0.4 -0.4 0.2 0.8 -0.6 0.
Comp .
1
AN
p
D
AWA
ET
p
E
ON
S
p AH
NE
I
T
Comp .
2
p AA N
WA
D
p
E
A
S
p
E
ON
TI
S
NE
Comp .
3
pA E
AT
N
T
D
O
p ON
H
N
I
T
MI
E
D
Comp .
WA
p
E
A
S
I
S
4
AN
p
D
ON
MI
N
D
E
Comp .
5
TO
p ON
S WA
N
p
E
AE
MI
T
D
A ND
Fig 2. First two Principal Components
Bede
3
Alfred
Second Principle Component
2
GD
OR
1
PP
0
-1
-2
-3
-4
-5
-4
-3
-2
-1
0
1
First Principle Component
2
3
4
Cluster Analysis
To get an idea about the closeness of usage of function words in various texts, we ran a cluster analysis
on data on 17 function words. When asked to produce three clusters, the 284 text blocks were divided as
shown in Table 4. We see that most of the text blocks from Boethius, Pastoral Care and Soliloquies
cluster together (cluster 3) and majority of Bede, Gregory’s Dialogues and Orosius blocks go to cluster 2.
Cluster analysis confirms our suspicion about the Prose Psalms with all the 17 text blocks staying in a
cluster of their own (cluster 1). However, about one-third of each of Bede and Orosius blocks also go
along with Prose Psalms.
Table 4. Cluster Membership using K-Means Clustering
Text
Number of blocks in
Cluster 1 Cluster 2 Cluster 3
Bede
13
43
2
Boethius
1
1
37
Pastoral Care
1
2
48
Soliloquies
2
0
14
Gregory’s Dialogues
2
57
5
Orosius
11
29
0
Prose Psalms
17
0
0
0OR 50 BO 10 150
OOR OR ROROR
OSR OR OR
OSOR OR CP BO
SOP OR OR CP
PP PP
P CP BO BO
SO CP CP BOBOBO
CPCP CPCP CPCP
CPCPCP CP
CP BOBO
CP BO BO
SO CP CP BOBO
SSOO BOBO BO
SO
Fig 3. Cluster Analysis of Boethius, Pastoral Care, Soliloquies, Orosius, and Prose Psalms using 17
Function Words
Figure 3 shows hierarchical clustering where we used text blocks only from Boethius, Pastoral Care,
Soliloquies, Orosius and Prose Psalms. Here also, we see that Prose Psalms don’t cluster along with
Alfredian texts and rather tend to stay close to Orosius.
Bibliography
Bately, J. (1982) Lexical evidence for the authorship of the prose psalms in the Paris Psalter. AngloSaxon England, 10, 69-95.
Scott, M. (1998) WordSmith Tools Manual, version 3.0, Oxford University Press.
Acknowledgements
This research is being supported by a grant in aid of research at OUC and a grant from the Natural
Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada.