  In Nature Human Behaviour 3/2019, an article was published entitled
"Large-scale quantitative profiling of the Old English verse tradition" dealing
with (besides other things) the question of the authorship of the Old English
poem Beowulf. The authors provide various textual measurements that they claim
present "serious obstacles to those who would advocate for composite authorship
or scribal recomposition" (p. 565). In what follows we raise doubts about their
methods and address serious errors in both their data and their code. We show
that reliable stylometric methods actually identify significant stylistic
heterogeneity in Beowulf. In what follows we discuss each method separately
following the order of the original article.
