Patterns of Tradition: A Digital Philological Approach to Gift, Song and Remembrance in Beowulf and The Lord of the Rings

This thesis offers a comparative digital philological analysis of Beowulf and The Lord of the Rings, focusing on three culturally resonant motifs rooted in the Germanic tradition: gift giving, singing, and funerary practices. The study investigates how these motifs are structured, repeated, and transformed across the two texts, tracing both narrative continuity and creative reconfiguration in Tolkien’s work. The research employs a mixed-method approach that combines textual encoding, data analysis, and close reading. Both texts were digitized and annotated using XML-TEI, enabling systematic tagging of events related to the selected motifs. Quantitative analysis—implemented through Python scripting—examines the frequency, distribution, and categorical patterns of the data. Close reading of key episodes offer interpretive insight into the symbolic and narrative functions of the motifs. A dedicated web-based corpus viewer was also developed to navigate and explore the annotated data. The thesis is structured into an introduction, six chapters, and two appendices: an overview of the historical and literary background (Chapter One); an examination of scholarly connections between Beowulf and Tolkien (Chapter Two); the methodological framework (Chapter Three); thematic analyses of gift giving (Chapter Four), singing (Chapter Five), and funerary practices (Chapter Six); followed by a conclusion and appendices. The study contributes original findings on motif recurrence and variation while demonstrating how digital methods can support rigorous and replicable literary analyse across historical and fictional texts.