Contributors

This website was funded by the AHRC "Group Identity and the Early Medieval Riddle Tradition" project. The project team members are Megan Cavell, Jennifer Neville, Neville Mogford and Alexandra Reider. The advisory board members are Catherine Clarke, Christina Lee and Clare Lees. The website was developed by Cerys Lewis, Research Software Engineer at the University of Birmingham.

Project Team:

Megan Cavell: I started The Riddle Ages blog as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Toronto. I'm now an Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham, but still an enthusiastic riddler! Anyone who has read through a few of my posts will also know that I’m a somewhat ridiculous person. This is one of the many reasons I love Old English and Latin riddles: they're beautiful pieces of poetry and fiercely clever, but also frequently cheeky and sometimes even downright silly. How relatable.

Neville Mogford: I received my PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London in 2020—it was about how timekeeping and medieval science influenced the development of Old English and Anglo-Latin poetry. In the same year, I joined the University of Birmingham as a postdoctoral research fellow to work on Latin riddles. For me, riddles are like tiny labyrinths. They are filled with meandering routes and branching paths, and you can happily get lost in them for hours. Some also contain monsters—but they are usually friendly.

Jennifer Neville: I’m a Reader in Early Medieval Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, and I’ve worked on the early medieval natural world, seasons, law codes, monsters, plants, national identity, travel, the Assumption of the Virgin, out of body experiences, horses, Tolkien, and, especially, riddles. I think it's terribly important that the Exeter Book Riddles don't have solutions, and I don’t trust the solutions given to the Latin riddles at all. As Bilbo said, in the dark, under the mountains: "Answers were to be guessed, not given."

Alexandra Reider: I received my PhD in English from Yale University in 2019 and lectured there in English the year after, teaching classes on medieval poetry, the English language, and baseball. My core academic interests are the multilingualism and multiculturalism of medieval literature—both hallmarks of the riddle tradition, specifically. I adore how seriously medieval literature takes puns and fun, and riddles are quite possibly the ultimate test of whether somebody's in on the joke. 

Past co-editors from The Riddle Ages blog include the wonderful Matthias Ammon and Victoria Symons.

Guest Contributors:

The Riddle Ages exhibits the work of many translators and academics at all career levels.

The list of contributors grows regularly. To date, we have published the work of:

  • Lindy Brady
  • David Callander
  • Corinne Dale
  • Andrea Di Carlo
  • Carlos M. Cepero
  • Bob DiNapoli
  • Denis Ferhatović
  • Wendy Hennequin
  • K. J. Keller
  • Judy Kendall
  • Pirkko Koppinen
  • Cameron Laird
  • Christopher Laprade
  • Jessica Lockhart
  • Britt Mize
  • José Antonio Alonso Navarro
  • Jennifer Neville
  • James Paz
  • Helen Price
  • Sharon Rhodes
  • Brett Roscoe
  • Erin Sebo
  • Robert Stanton
  • Eggi Triyadi
  • Michael J. Warren
  • Franziska Wenzel
  • Beth Whalley
  • Alexandra Zhirnova

We welcome guest contributors, so do get in touch at: theriddleages@bham.ac.uk