London, July 25 (ANI): Coventry University researchers have claimed that Beowulf and Homer's Iliad are more plausible than stories by Shakespeare, Tolkien and JK Rowling because their characters' relationships are more lifelike.
Their findings support historians' belief that ancient myths including Beowulf, The Iliad and the traditional Irish poem Tain Bo Cuailnge may be based, at least in part, on real communities and people.
The researchers analysed the texts of the three ancient stories and compared the complex web of characters' relationships with the type of "social networks" that occur in real life.
For each character the physicists calculated their popularity, based on how many relationships they had with other characters and whether they were friends or enemies. Then, they examined the overall dynamic between the cast as a whole.
Their results, published in the journal Europhysics Letters, showed that the societies depicted in the stories strongly mirrored real social networks of company directors, film actors and scientists which had been mapped out by other academics.
In contrast they found that four works known to be entirely fictional - Shakespeare's Richard III, Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring, the first instalment of Rowling's Harry Potter series and Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo, contained telltale signs of being fictional.
"In the myths but also in real social networks, you tend to have sub-communities who do not know anybody else. In fiction, everyone tends to be completely connected with each other," the Telegraph quoted Padraig Mac Carron, co-author of the report, as saying.
"In reality you also have popular people with hundreds of friends, then a few people with maybe 70, and a lot of people with a lot less friends. But [In fiction] you get a lot of characters who have the same number of friends. Almost everyone that Harry Potter knows and interacts with also meets and interacts with Ron and Hermione, for example," he explained.
Although the three myths, which include monsters and magic, are clearly not historical accounts the study suggests they may have been composed with real communities in mind, Mac Carron added.
"The societies portrayed in these stories are believable ... not the events, or even the actual people, but the overall society is realistic," he said. (ANI)
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