The Dialect and Authorship of Richard the Redeless and Mum and the Sothsegger.

Studies of the authorship of Richard and Mum have not generally considered the dialect in which these poems were composed. In this article, Horobin “provides a detailed study of the dialects of the two poems” in order to discern possible shared authorship (134). Drawing on Samuels’s work on L’s dialect and the data contained in the LALME, Horobin presents extensive linguistic data from the poems to conclude “that the native dialects of these poems’ authors were that of Bristol” (151). In her stylistic and metrical study of the poems Helen Barr had previously suggested a common, metropolitan authorship. This dialectical study, thus, “lends powerful support to the theory of shared authorship,” and the poems should be considered as the work of a single author, “native to Bristol and living in London” (152).