Riddles 1 to 3 are quite clearly thematically linked, and it is because of this that they have also been read as one very long riddle (especially because Riddle 2 and the sections of Riddle 3 begin with the same word: Hwilum (sometimes)). This, of course, throws off the riddle numbering system (which you should note is an editorial practice and does not appear in the Exeter Book manuscript). For this website’s purposes, we’re sticking to the old school riddle numbering (i.e. the one in Krapp and Dobbie’s edition – see the About the Exeter Book page for more on this) because this is the system most online riddle resources use.

As for solutions (1), you may have noticed that the same ones crop up for each of the three related riddles. They are all commonly solved as Storm or Wind, but this doesn’t come close to covering all the potential solutions (scholars like to disagree). Other suggestions include Atmosphere, Power of Nature, Sun (esp. for riddles 2 and 3) and all manner of different types of storms (including Apocalyptic Storm, Hurricane, Earthquake, Storm at Sea and Thunderstorm). Riddle 1 has also been solved as Fire and Raiding Party or Army, while Riddle 2 has been solved as Anchor and Riddle 3 as Revenant. In addition to the stormy weather solutions, another trend can be seen throughout the riddles and that relates to religion. This is unsurprising considering the Exeter Book was donated to a cathedral library by a bishop – in fact, most early English literature has a strong religious connection because of the structure of this society and its scribal culture (think monasteries!). So, this religious trend has resulted in the following solutions: Riddle 1 as God, Riddle 2 as Christ and Riddle 3 as Cross, Spirit and Supernatural Force.

Having read a good chunk of Old English poetry, it seems pretty clear that each of the three riddles does possess religious connotations. All this talk of leaders controlling the destructive action of whatever þrymful þeow (powerful servant) is narrating definitely signals a divine entity. In fact, these poems echo in some ways the verse lines of the Old English translation of Boethius’ Consolatione philosophiae (Consolation of Philosophy). A section from Metre 20 (lines 63-74), which deals with the elements, reads:

Habbað þeah þa feower      frumstol hiora,
æghwilc hiora      agenne stede,
þeah anra hwilc      wið oðer sie
miclum gemenged      and mid mægne eac
fæder ælmihtiges      fæste gebunden,
gesiblice,      softe togædre
mid bebode þine,      bilewit fæder,
þætte heora ænig      oðres ne dorste
mearce ofergangan      for metodes ege,
ac [geþweorod] sint      ðegnas togædre,
cyninges cempan,      cele wið hæto,
wæt wið drygum,      winnað hwæðre. (2)
(Nevertheless each of the four have their proper station, their own place, although each of them may be greatly mixed with the other and also, by the might of the almighty father, bound fast, peaceably, gently together by your decree, merciful father, so that none of them dared to go over the other’s boundary because of fear of the lord, but the retainers are made to agree, the champions of the king, cold with heat, wet with dry, yet they compete.)

Rambunctious elements! Photo (by Terry Lucas) from Wikimedia Commons (licence: CC BY 3.0).

The rest of the poem goes on to discuss God’s control over the elements, which is again mentioned in relation to binding a hundred lines later:

Hafað fæder engla      fyr gebunden
efne to þon fæste      þæt hit fiolan ne mæg
eft æt his eðle      þær þæt oðer fyr
up ofer eall þis      eardfæst wunað. (153-56)
(The father of angels has bound fire precisely so fast that it may not return to its homeland where that other fire, up over all this, remains firmly fixed.)

Riddle 3’s focus on confinement in particular maps nicely onto this Boethian vision of the cosmos. It’s also noteworthy that Riddles 2 and 3 end with a similar challenge to the listener: the riddler not only asks what is narrating the poem, but also what is controlling the speaker:

                 Saga, þoncol mon,
hwa mec bregde      of brimes fæþmum,
þonne streamas eft      stille weorþað,
yþa geþwære,      þe mec ær wrugon. (12b-15)
(Say, thoughtful one, who draws me from the depths of the ocean, when the streams become still again, obedient the waves, which earlier concealed me.)

and

                  Saga hwæt ic hatte,
oþþe hwa mec rære,      þonne ic restan ne mot,
oþþe hwa mec stæðþe,      þonne ic stille beom. (72b-4)
(Say what I am called, or who raises me, when I may not rest, or who stays me, when I am still.)

Although Riddle 1 doesn’t end this way, it does include a reference to the powers that control it:

                  heahum meahtum
wrecen on waþe,      wide sended (10b-11).
(pressed into wandering / by the powers on high, sent afar).

This all seems to suggest that the solution calls for a master-servant duo. And so, perhaps God and the Elements (or in Old English: God ond þa Feower Gesceafta) would make a nice solution for all three of these poems. Of course, the poet seems to prefer the destructive aspect of each element…but without central heating, this isn’t particularly surprising!

Riddle-solvers have had fun with this one, so brace yourselves. First off, Fry’s riddle-solution article lists the following suggestions: Bell, Millstone, Necromancy, Flail, Lock, Handmill, Pen and Phallus. How could someone possibly associate a bell and a phallus? I’ll leave that up to you.

But the fun doesn’t stop there. In the same year that Fry’s article was published, Ann Harleman Stewart writes an article (full ref details below) suggesting Bucket of Water, which A. N. Doane goes on to refine in another article. According to the Bucket-reading, the various rings that the riddle describes are either links on a chain, the straps surrounding the bucket (i.e. the ones that hold the pieces of wood in place) and/or a sheet of ice on the surface of the water. Certainly, the description of grumbling, chilly, early-rising servants would fit this interpretation, as does the reference to “bursting” the bound ring, if we’re talking about ice.

Photo of a not-very-medieval bucket with frozen water from Wikimedia Commons (licence: CC BY-SA 2.0).

But the fun doesn’t stop there. In the very same year (1991), we have another two scholars who suggest a pretty fun solution: Dog or Watchdog. These are Wim Tigges and Ray Brown (the scholars…not the dogs). Now the "cry" is a bark, the rings are a collar and leash and someone is really unhappy to be dragged out of bed by a frolicsome pup. I promise to feed and walk it every morning, mom, really!

But the fun doesn’t stop there. If you’re a cat person, you might agree with the next person to take a crack at solving Riddle 4. In 2007, Melanie Heyworth suggests that what we’re actually dealing with here is the Devil. She compares the use of words keywords in the poem to the language of penitentials (outlines of penance for sins) and homilies and finds a lot of overlap. Noting that most of the words in the poem have double meanings, she sees a lot of condemning with fetters and violation of religious worship (not to mention sex, reading the wearm lim as a "hot penis"). All of this is to say, if you’re a sleepy medieval person, you had better get yourself out of bed and into the church…being tired means you’re not alert and that makes you vulnerable to temptation (see "Hrothgar’s Sermon" in Beowulf, lines 1700-74), if you don’t believe me).

Photo of a not-so-medieval devil statue from Wikimedia Commons (licence: CC BY-SA 3.0).

But, you guessed it, the fun still doesn’t stop there. I’m a big fan of the next solution, Shannon Ferri Cochran’s 2009 suggestion that we’re actually dealing with a Plough Team. This reading takes the various rings as the neck-yoke on the oxen pulling the plough, as well as the wheels of the object itself. The nice, bursty sound now becomes wheels slopping through a muddy field, and the characters in the poem become the driver and his servant. Part of what I like about this interpretation is the way it maps onto a poem we haven’t yet gotten to: Riddle 21, a similarly fettered plough. But you’ll have to wait for that one.

And finally, oh finally, the fun stops (well…for now). Patrick J. Murphy’s 2011 book, Unriddling the Exeter Riddles, brings us full circle to Bell again. That’s right, the solution that had the most supporters in Fry’s 1981 article is back in the spotlight. Here, Murphy concentrates on the rings as puns on "to ring" (you know, like you ring…well…a bell) and the binding as an allusion to the bell’s duty as a servant (it’s "bound" to carry out it’s job…ba-dum ching). Murphy also looks to other texts where bells are governed by the verb hyran, which he points out can mean both ‘"o obey" and "to hear."

Photo (by Suguri F) of a not-so-medieval hand bell from Wikimedia Commons (licence: CC BY-SA 3.0).

So, what do I think? I simply do not know. To be honest with you, all these readings are pretty convincing. That’s why people keep publishing them. I suppose if push came to shove, I’d be inclined to support the Bucket (or OE wæter-stoppa, according to Niles) reading since it seems to cover all the bases. But if I’ve learned one thing from reading up on Riddle 4, it’s that there’s always room for more!

[Editorial Note: Another solution has now been proposed!: Sword. Check out Corinne Dale’s, “A New Solution to Exeter Book Riddle 4” in Notes and Queries, vol. 64, issue 1 (2017), pages 1-3.]

This riddle is most commonly solved as "shield" and this is the solution I’m adopting here. The shield is one of the most common accessories of the protagonists of heroic poetry (see for example the importance of this piece of battle-equipment in poems like Beowulf or The Battle of Maldon) and as such is one of the most important symbols of this social world. In this riddle, the usual connotations are subverted. While the poem uses the common associations of the shield with swords (ecg, bill) and battle (wig, beadoweorc), the shield is cast in the role of an exile, as suggested by the poetic term anhaga, familiar to readers of Old English poetry from the first line of The Wanderer (Oft him anhaga are gebideð…, "Often the solitary man himself experiences favour…"), a poem which explores the mental landscape of somebody who is no longer a part of the heroic social world (full translation here). It may for example also be considered significant that the shield cannot find any security in the burg, the "stronghold," a word that is etymologically and semantically connected to other words relating to "safety" in Old English.

Here’s a reconstructed Viking shield from the Barrow-in-Furness Dock Museum.

Like the main character of The Wanderer, the shield is unable to do anything about what’s happening to it – note that it talks about the things being done to it, with me as the object of the sentences in the middle of the poem and the final two lines. Where the shield is the subject, the verbs are not ones of action (seo: "I see"; forwurðe: "I perish"; findan meahte: "I might find"). As we have already seen in some of the other riddles, the shield – an inanimate object – speaks in the first person (a literary technique known as "prosopopeia"). Through this, the shield to a certain extent takes on the persona of a human warrior, scarred by many battles and left without companions.

The riddle therefore plays with several aspects of the shield’s identity: it is a heroic object, used in potentially glorious battles, but its essentially defensive nature means it’s less glamorous than an active, attacking weapon like a sword – it has things done to it and can do nothing to change its fate. Like the exiles whose plight is evoked in the Old English elegies, the description of the shield shows what one might call the flipside of the heroic world: the scars, the injuries, the grittiness of battle, the potential for the individual to be left without help or companionship.

As we have already seen with the other riddles, the poet here employs language familiar from other contexts to show the sun in a new light (if you’ll excuse the pun). In Riddle 5, elegiac exile imagery was transferred to an object intimately associated with the social world of heroic poetry; here, a part of the natural world is described as a warlike thing. Again, the language of the relationship between a lord and his follower is evoked. The emphasis on Christ as commanding the sun also serves to set this riddle very much in a Christian context. This coming together of heroic imagery and Christian themes is something that is quite common in Old English poetry. In this case, for example, some scholars have argued that the dual nature of the sun, which is sometimes pleasant and sometimes painful, reflects the nature of Christ himself – his "warmth" is pleasant to faithful believers and painful to sinners. There is thus a metaphorical focus within the poem that raises it beyond the playful description of a natural object, which is something worth bearing in mind when reading the riddles in general. At any rate, I’m sure we can agree that the riddle shows a certain early medieval ambiguity about the sun (which some might say has persisted up to the present day).

In the manuscript, the text of the riddle is followed by a single rune, usually taken as representing the letter "s" and standing for Old English sigel or possibly Latin sol. Both of these words mean "sun," so the rune might be a further hint towards the solution of the riddle. We will come back to runes with some of the other riddles.

Photo (by Jessie Eastland) from Wikimedia Commons (licence: CC BY-SA 3.0).

This post once again comes to us from Jessica Lockhart. Enjoy!

I still remember how baffled I was the first time I came across this riddle in undergrad. A person who walks on earth, inhabits a home, riles up water, and has a singing garment that lifts them over houses? Could it be a saint? Some kind of spirit? A medieval Boba Fett with a jetpack and some jingle bells?

Although Riddle 7 may sound bizarre to our ears at first, it is actually one of those riddles about which scholars feel confident in their solution. Franz Dietrich solved the riddle definitively as "swan" (OE swon or swan) in 1859 – more specifically, as some scholars since have pointed out, the riddle refers to the mute swan, cygnus olor, a species which was resident year-round in early medieval England and found widely throughout Europe.

This photo (by Arpingstone) is from Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The pivotal clue is the singing of the creature’s clothing in the final lines:

                   Frætwe mine
swogað hlude         ond swinsiað,
torhte singað,         þonne ic getenge ne beom
flode ond foldan,   ferende gæst.
(My adornments sound out loud and entune sweetly, (1) sing clearly, when I am not touching flood and fold, a soul faring.)

This is a beautiful description of the sound the mute swan’s feathers make when the swan is beating its wings in flight. Once we know the solution, the riddle’s earlier clues make sense as well: "treading the land" becomes the swan’s waddle, the dwelling it settles on becomes its nest, and "disturbing the waters" becomes an apt description of the paddling of the swan’s oary feet. Only when the swan is travelling in its third element, the windy air, does the swan’s clothing demonstrate its twin marvellous potentials for flight and song.

But as Megan would say, the fun doesn’t stop there. As you’ve probably noticed, this riddle uses a set of four alliterating verbs to describe the swan’s clothes: first they swigað (keep silent), and then they swogað (make a sound), *swinsiað (make melody), and singað (sing). These similar-sounding words lend the riddle some nice unity (and anticipate the final "sw-" word of "swan"), but as Dieter Bitterli has recently shown, they also work on another level. In the Middle Ages, common wisdom held that the Latin word for swan, cygnus, came from the verb canere, "to sing." Isidore of Seville gives this origin in his Etymologies, and claimed this was because the swan actually sings beautifully with its long throat. (Our legend about the dying "swan-song" actually goes all the way back to ancient Greece). By connecting the swan to singing, this riddle evokes this etymology. But interestingly, instead of going with Isidore’s explanation, the Exeter riddle poet has created a set of clues that explains the mute swan’s "song" using the actual behaviour of the bird, and also implies that the Old English word "swan", too, reveals the bird’s connection with these verbs, especially "swinsiað." (2) Neat, eh?

So, what else is interesting about this riddle? Let’s look at how this riddle establishes a worldview. The first and last sentences of this riddle do a lot of work: they convey all the essential etymological and behavioural clues for "swan" and set up the rhetorical antithesis (poetic contrast) between silence and sound that forms the riddle’s semantic core. These sentences do so much work that if you were to eliminate everything but these first and last sentences, arguably the riddle would still be perfectly complete. (Short pithy riddles like it were very much the style of the Latin riddler Symphosius and several of his English followers.) But what else the riddle does, is create for us a moving meditation on the place of this extraordinary bird in a human-inhabited world. The creature lives in a dwelling, wears adornments, and treads the ground like a human, (3) and when it is carried astonishingly through the air, the riddle emphasizes how close it remains to human civilization:

Hwilum mec ahebbað         ofer hæleþa byht
hyrste mine,         ond þeos hea lyft,
ond mec þonne wide         wolcna strengu
ofer folc byreð.
(Sometimes my dress and this lofty air lift me over the home of heroes; and widely, then, does the clouds’ strength bear me over mankind.)

This is a trick we should watch out for in later riddles: the speaker playfully offers a perspective down on those who (if looking up) would not see an amazing speaker with singing clothes, but the bird we’d know and recognize.

There’s a playful artistry involved in making a riddle very specific while at the same time very misleading, and a new bonus level of artistry when a riddle takes something we have always accepted as normal (a water-bird, a name, a genre, an idea) and uses that concept to crack open reality like an eggshell, to show us wonder and potential that we ignore. Riddles like Exeter 7 work to show us how much more curious we should be than we are.

Who knew that early medieval England had such a vibrant nightlife? Whenever I read this poem, I’m struck with the image of lounge lizard monks clubbing and singing karaoke (thanks to Elaine Treharne for tweeting this suggestion!). It’s actually rather distracting when it comes to writing the commentary.

But since you’re no doubt dying to hear more about this riddle, let’s start with the solution. Well, like all of the Exeter Book riddles, this one has had a variety of proposed solutions. According to Fry’s list of riddle solutions (which you really should be getting familiar with by now, but I’ll give you the reference below anyway!), scholars have argued for: Nightingale, Pipe, Woodpigeon, Bell, Jay, Chough, Jackdaw, Thrush, Starling, Crying Baby, Frogs, Soul and Devil as Buffoon. I’ve missed out Flute, but I’m too far away from a library at the minute to check that this suggestion came early enough for Fry to include it in his list. Homework: someone go check this and let us know! But at any rate the solutions are mainly a lot of birds and a few other noisy things. Obviously, sound is the motif we want to tune into (pardon the pun), considering the sheer volume of song/speech words repeated throughout this poem.

But we’ll get to that in a moment. For now, solution-wise, I’m going to throw my lot in with Nightingale, or Old English, Nihtegale. Why?, you might ask, and the reason to that question would be what Dieter Bitterli has dubbed the “etymological principle.” The riddle makes it very clear that what we’re dealing with here is something that sings (galan) in the night (niht). So that would be a night- (niht) singer (gale). A niht-gale. Nihtegale. Got it?

This photo (by J. Dietrich) is from Wikimedia Commons (licence: CC BY-SA 3.0).

Another thing to point out is that our previous riddle dealt with the mute swan. Now we’ve got the noisy nightingale and (spoiler alert!) we’ll continue on with a few more birds in the riddles immediately following. These runs of connected riddles are found throughout the Exeter Book collection, as we saw with Riddles 1-3, and I think they’re very useful in narrowing down the general subject matter of a lot of the poems.

As for the sorts of words this riddle makes use of, we have the ever-popular sound/voice range: reord, heafodwoþ, hleoþor, stefn and woþ. Noise-making verbs include: sprecan, singan, wrixlan (sort of), cirman, styrman, onhyrian and bodian. Then, of course, we have the muþ (mouth) and two references to hlude (loudly), etc. etc. which is all contrasted to the stillness of human-life (stille on wicum / sittað nigende).

But human-life is also present very much in the personification of the birds, which tends to take on some fairly off-the-wall diction from time to time. For example, we’ve got heafodwoþe (literally, “head-voice”), a compound word that is only found here and whose elements collocate (that is, appear close together) nowhere else in the Old English corpus. Both parts of the compound are common, although woþ is especially mentioned along with other “voice,” “mouth” and “speech” words in poems about animals, such as The Phoenix (lines 127-8, 547-8), The Panther (lines 42-4) and The Whale (line 2), or animalistic and demonic forces in Guthlac A and B (lines 263-5, 390-3, 898-900).

Another unique compound is æfensceop (evening-singer), which is basically a way of talking around the riddle’s solution: evening/night + a word for a singer = nihtegale, as above. Scirenige is, perhaps, more exciting because it may be an actress-word. Editors frequently emend it (that is, take an educated guess at a correction) to the form scericge, which describes the entertaining St. Pelagia elsewhere in Old English (see Bosworth and Toller). Unfortunately for my dream of becoming an early medieval actress, though, Mercedes Salvador(-Bello) makes a good case for understanding this word not in terms of acting, but as a reference to light and to the Latin form for nightingale, luscinia. Finally, sceawendwis appears to be linked to entertainers as well, gesturing to a sort of jester-type of silliness: elsewhere, we find the compound sceawendspræc, which glosses the Latin scurrilitas (buffoonery). Bosworth and Toller’s dictionary defines this second Old English compound as “the speech of the theatre.” Although, of course, “theatre” may be slightly anachronistic for an early medieval context.

But there’s certainly something theatrical going on here in the bird-community that may or may not be a bit annoying to those quiet city-folk.

This post once again comes to us from Jennifer Neville. Enjoy!

However you look at it, Riddle 9 is a sad story. On the surface, it’s the story of a monster-child, a revenant who rewards a well-meaning foster-mother with the murder of her beloved children. Most readers don’t worry too much about that monster, though; already primed to recognise anthropomorphism when they see it, they interpret that loyal kinswoman as a hapless bird that’s had the ill-fortune of a visit from a cuckoo. We are less familiar with cuckoos than we used to be, and so the ornithology may not be more mysterious now than it was during the early medieval period.

Drawing of a cuckoo from Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The basic scenario is this: some—not all—cuckoo species do not care for their own chicks. Instead, they lay their eggs one by one in the nests of other birds and leave foster-parents to feed and protect them. When they hatch, these chicks are often bigger than their "brothers and sisters," and they often hatch first. They are not only bigger and earlier, however; they are also louder. In fact, one cuckoo chick on its own makes as much noise as a whole brood of ordinary chicks. Unsurprisingly enough, the most demanding chick wins the most attention, and the most food, from its hard-working parents. The usurper also sometimes tries to edge the other chicks out of the nest; even worse, parent birds finding their own chicks perched precariously on the edge sometimes mistake them for outsiders and finish the job themselves. As a result, once mature enough to fly away, the cuckoo chick leaves its foster-parents with smaller or fewer offspring of their own, or even none at all.

The story is tragic, yet the Old English riddle restrains itself strictly to the cuckoo-chick’s point of view: we hear plenty of praise for the generous mother-bird who is so helpful to the growing parasite, but no sorrow at all for her or for her dead babies, only a classically wry comment that there were fewer of them as a result of their mother’s generosity.

That may be all that is needed to be said. Certainly the natural history of the cuckoo was (and is) interesting enough in its own right (see Bitterli for the literary tradition surrounding the cuckoo). Yet there’s an emotional charge here, despite—or perhaps because—of the poet’s restraint. We aren’t told about the weeping mother, but she’s still there, lurking inside the anthropomorphised bird. And so I wonder whether this riddle might also be seen as a commentary on the social institution of fostering: the custom, particularly among noble families, of sending children to be raised in other households or courts. Beowulf seems to have benefitted, for example, from being raised in the household of his grandfather, King Hrethel (Beowulf, lines 2428-34). In his case, the system seems to have been mutually beneficial: the fosterling maintained a staunch loyalty for the family in which he was brought up, fighting bravely on Higelac’s behalf throughout his kingship and then supporting the rule of Higelac’s young son, Heardred, even though the queen offered him the kingship. Yet it is easy to imagine that the system might not always have worked so well.  What if the visiting prince used up more than his fair share of scarce resources? What if he entered into competition with his foster-parents’ children? What if he "accidently" killed them in a "friendly" duel? The riddle presents precisely the sorrowful outcome that might come out of honourably fulfilling the obligations of fosterage, if one were unfortunate enough to be cursed with a "cuckoo chick".

A cuckoo chick and crow from Wikimedia Commons (licence: CC BY-SA 4.0).

Again, that may be all that is needed to be said. It’s worth noting, however, that Riddle 9 neither begins nor ends with an explicit riddling tag, and that the absence of solutions in the manuscript means that there is always the possibility that we should carry on with the interpretive process. After all, we have in the manuscript three entries from the Physiologus: descriptions of animals that lead to allegorical readings. And, in fact, Riddle 9’s narrative can be translated into a story that might have been useful for preachers. Thus the mother bird can be seen as the soul living in the world (souls are often represented as birds). Her "offspring" are her good thoughts, stored in the nest of her heart. Too often, however, the devil (the cuckoo) insinuates himself (or, strictly speaking, herself) into that heart and leaves behind a sinful thought that grows ever larger, more attractive, and more demanding until those other nest-mates dwindle and disappear. The end result, once again, is dryly understated: the absence of good thoughts ultimately means eternal damnation.

As I’ve already said, there is no need in Riddle 9 for an allegorical reading or for social commentary. On the other hand, there is no reason why these things should not be there: Riddle 43 contains an allegory of body and soul, and several of the riddles include considerations of social roles (see, for example, Riddle 20, in which the sword reflects on its relationship with its lord). With no prologue, instructions, or solutions, Riddle 9, like all the Exeter Book riddles, invites a plethora of interpretive strategies. More importantly, it rules none out.

While the solutions that have been proposed for this riddle range from "alchemy" and "baptism" to "bubble" and "water lily," the most commonly accepted solution is "barnacle goose" (Old English byrnete). This puts this riddle in line with the preceding bird riddles – once again the bird speaks of itself in the first person and tells the audience of its particular identifying characteristic: in this case, the genesis of the bird from wood and water. It was commonly believed in medieval times that barnacle geese were somehow grown from the barnacle shells that cling to driftwood floating in the sea. In fact, the word "barnacle" stems from the name for the bird rather than the other way around! And while this folk belief in the origin of the barnacle goose pops up a lot in the later Middle Ages, this riddle is in fact the earliest evidence that people thought this. Dieter Bitterli, whose work on the bird riddles has already been mentioned in some of the other commentaries, suggests that this myth may have originated in Britain where the arctic barnacle geese spend the winter and was handed down over generations to the authors of later medieval zoology text books.

The process of the birth of the barnacle goose is somewhat obscurely referred to in lines 4b-5 (with the bird’s body "touching" a floating piece of wood) and in the first half-line, which might allude to the bird’s hanging from the piece of wood by its beak, thus obtaining nourishment. Another characteristic is the "black garment" with "white trappings" which the speaker describes (see below for visual proof of this, though there are probably many other creatures to whom this might apply!). And barnacle geese are indeed "carried widely over the seal’s bath" – they breed on islands in the North Atlantic and come south to winter in Great Britain and the Netherlands (nothing like a balmy British winter to take the chill off…).

A goose! Photo (by Andrey) from Wikimedia Commons (licence: CC BY 2.0).

One interesting expression in this riddle is the feorh cwico of l. 6. I’ve translated this as "living spirit," but Leslie Lockett discusses feorh as meaning something more like "life-force," something that has to enter a thing to give it life – even one born from wood and water (page 44)! If you look back at Riddle 9, the cuckoo likewise explains that it did not have feorh when it was in the egg, so it’s something that comes with being born. And like the cuckoo, which was covered in a protective garment, the barnacle goose is protected by water which allows it to grow and become lifgende.

For those of you who might now be worrying that early medieval folks were a bit obsessed by birds, stay tuned for the next post’s change in direction.

That’s right, folks, it’s the one you’ve been waiting for. Were you starting to worry that popular conceptions of early medieval England were all made up? Well, here comes the alcohol-riddle (and not the only one at that!), to make things right again. Of course, this is not a carousing drinking party of early medieval boisterousness, but quite a stern look at the effects of too much wine on one’s table manners and mortal soul. That is, of course, if we accept the solution Wine (OE Win) or Cup/Vessel of Wine (OE Winfæt), which most scholars do. Some, however, prefer the solutions Night, Gold and Phallus. I’m going to leave that last one to your imaginations, but will say that both Night and Gold have a little something going for them.

Much of the difficulty in choosing between Night, Gold and Wine lies in the translation of the word, hasofag. In fact, both parts of this unique compound have quite a few meanings. To start with the second element, fah can mean "hostile" or even "foe," as well as "variegated," "discoloured," "bright" or "adorned." I’ve chosen to translate it as "stained," hoping to get across both the sense of colour and bad behaviour. The first element, hasu, is also tricky to translate. It can mean "grey," "ash-coloured" or "tawny". But how can it be both dark/grey and yellowy-brown?, you might ask. The simple answer is that early medieval folks didn’t think of colours in quite the same way that we do. The slightly-more-complicated answer is that, while modern colour theory is more interested in identifying different hues, the early medieval English tended to differentiate based on brightness. I guess if most of your possessions are a dull brownish-grey, the bright glinting of a sword would be far more interesting than that fact that it’s a similar colour (in our sense of the word). Because of the complexities of translating Old English colours into Modern English ones, we can similarly argue that read doesn’t necessarily mean what we think of as "red." And so the first few lines of the riddle can be said to represent some sort of dark thing that has other, shinier things on it! Stars on the face of the night sky? Or light glinting off gold? (gold and read are a common pair in Old English poetry) Or the glistening of wine in a glass? These are all decent options.

The next few lines, then, go on to talk about the silly people who get all turned around and misled by whatever our riddle-object is. Night would, of course, make sense here, but it seems a bit obvious. Early medieval poets like metaphors, so a riddle about people who actually go out and get lost may have less going for it. Gold (like Wine) works, though. Both hoarding and drinking excessively are, after all, clearly no-no’s according to the church. There is, of course, another hoard mentioned in the last two lines, although, again, hord could be translated a number of ways, including as just "treasure." The treasure raised on high, then, may be the riddle-object, i.e. a glass of wine or a piece of gold (though I think it makes more sense to raise up a glass than a piece of gold…unless you’re Gollum). But this may also be a reference to a metaphorical hoard: the soul. Old English poetry often describes the body as a kind of fancy treasure-chest for storing the spirit. According to this metaphorical reading, the raising up bit is of course death, at which point the repentant soul hopes to go to heaven.

Gold nuggets! Image from Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

So, the wordplay-ish reference to raising things on high has me leaning toward Wine now, over Gold. Not literally. And there are a few other parts of the poem that imply this is the right direction to take. One is the reference to the owner of the riddle-object being mode bestolene (robbed of reason). The deprivation of sense associated with drinking is also mentioned in the equal-parts-awesome-and-gross Old English Judith. This poem tells the story of a woman who chops off the head of her invading enemy, Holofernes, when he’s drunk. Early on in the poem, we hear: Gefeol ða wine swa druncen / se rica on his reste middan, swa he nyste ræda nanne / on gewitlocan (67b-9a) (Then the powerful one fell in the middle of his bed, so drunk from wine that he did not know any reason in his mind). Although these poems don’t share the same words in Old English, they certainly share a similar sense: drinking is bad…it causes you to pass out and/or do stupid things.

Finally, the clincher for the Wine solution, as far as I’m concerned, is the very last line of the poem, gif hi unrædes ær ne geswicaþ. This line is repeated almost word for word at the end of (SPOILER ALERT) Riddle 27, which is commonly solved as Mead. I should also say that the line has close approximations in Juliana, line 120 (gif þu unrædes ær ne geswicest) and Elene, line 516 (ond þæs unrihtes eft geswicaþ), which are more interested in blasphemy than alcohol…but still.

I’m feeling quite thirsty now, so I’m going to leave you there.

Red, red wine. In a non-medieval glass. Obv. Image (by André Karwath) from Wikimedia Commons (licence: CC BY-SA 3.0).