Exeter Riddle 65
MEGANCAVELL
Date: Thu 10 Aug 2017Matching Commentaries: Commentary for Exeter Riddle 65
Riddle 65’s translation comes to us from Judy Kendall, Reader in English and Creative Writing at Salford University. She’s especially interested in poetic composition, visual text and translation, both in an academic context and from the standpoint of a creative practitioner. You can see her creative record of the process of translating an Old English riddle in ‘brief brief: a riddle’ in Amsterdam’s Versal Literary & Arts Journal, issue 12.
Cwico wæs ic, ne cwæð ic wiht, cwele ic efne seþeah.
Ær ic wæs, eft ic cwom. Æghwa mec reafað,
hafað mec on headre, ond min heafod scireþ,
biteð mec on bær lic, briceð mine wisan.
Monnan ic ne bite, nympþe he me bite;
sindan þara monige þe mec bitað.
Quick to life I was, I did not quip at all, yet even so I’m quelled.
Before I was, renewed I came. I’m everybody’s quarry,
they hold me in fetters, and hack off my head,
bite my stripped body, snap my stalk.
I will not bite a man, unless he bites me;
many are they that bite me.
Notes:
This riddle appears on folio 125r of The Exeter Book.
The above Old English text is based on this edition: Elliott van Kirk Dobbie and George Philip Krapp, eds, The Exeter Book, Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), page 230.
Note that this edition numbers the text Riddle 63: Craig Williamson, ed., The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), page 105.
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