SNORRI STURLUSON AND EGILS SAGA: STATISTICS OF STYLE
Ralph West, Snorri Sturluson, Bruce Olsen, Per Wieselgren, Sigurõur Nordal, M.C. van den Toorn · 2016
many years scholars have assumed that the great Icelandic writer Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241) was the author of Egils saga Skallagrimssonar, and there is an extensive history of scholarly work aimed at proving or disproving this assumption. B. M. Olsen, Per Wieselgren, Sigurour Nordal, M. C. van den Toorn, and Peter Hallberg have been major contributors in this effort.1 With the exception of Per Wieselgren these scholars concluded that Snorri wrote Egils saga. Unfortunately those studies which are historical-philological in method lack sufficient evidence for a definitive solution, and those studies which are statistical in method lack the statistical precision needed to state the degree of confidence which we can place in the correctness of the solution. Peter Hallberg' s study inspires a high degree of intuitive confidence, but its comparison of extremely rare words needs to be supplemented with the comparison of words of high frequency. The definitive study of The Federalist papers published in 1964 by the statisticians Mosteller and Wallace tells us that functional words of high frequency are some of the best possible discriminators of the style of an author.2 Therefore the present study was conducted in order to provide more evidence for Snorri' s authorship of Egils saga, and the statistical analysis of words and other discriminators of high frequency form the basis for its conclusions.