An author, Booth tells us, can never appear truly objective to their readers:

The implied author may either narrate the story in their own name or delegate that task to a distinct narrator, possessed of their own attitude and point of view. The story is thus mediated through at least one subjective lens, often two. In many medieval texts, such subjectivity is hard to locate. Thus, Shippey comments on the impersonality of Old English verse:

Several factors can explain that apparent lack of subjectivity. First of all, the concepts of implied author and narrator, which are tremendously important to modern and postmodern literature, do not apply very well to many medieval texts. As noted by Marnette, the anonymity of much of the medieval corpus is in itself evidence of the very different conception of textual authorship in that period. A lot of texts, including much of Old English poetry, do not appear as the productions of single individuals, but rather as the outcome of a complex process of transmission involving numerous actors: composers, translators, adaptors, scribes, compilers, but also, more fundamentally, all the past poets and audiences who contributed to shape the formulaic tradition, hence Pasternack's idea of an ‘implied tradition’ rather than an ‘implied author’.