Riddle Ages

Commentary for Exeter Riddle 55

MEGANCAVELL

Date: Wed 28 Sep 2016

Matching Riddle: Exeter Riddle 55

Riddle 55’s commentary is once again by Franziska Wenzel of Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Take it away, Franziska!

 

A tree, splendid and otherworldly? Sounds familiar. Wasn’t there a movie about that? Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain? Except that’s not what we’re talking about; we’re talking about an Old English poem. No problem, I know it either way: that’s The Dream of the Rood (full translation here)! Oh, wait…except it’s not. It’s another riddle pretending to be about something entirely different than you’d think.

Still, it reminds me of The Dream of the Rood very much, especially the beginning. For comparison, the tree in that poem is introduced as follows:

Þuhte me þæt ic gesawe     syllicre treow

on lyft lædan,       leohte bewunden,

beama beorhtost.     Eall þæt beacen wæs

begoten mid golde;     gimmas stodon

fægere æt foldan sceatum,     swlyce þær fife wæron

uppe on þam eaxlegespanne.     Beheoldon þær engel Dryhtnes ealle,

fægere þurh forðgesceaft.     Ne wæs ðær huru fracodes gealga.

Ac hine þær beheoldon     halige gastas,

men ofe rmoldan     ond eall þeps mære gesceaft.

(Swanton, page 89)

(It seemed to me that I saw a wondrous tree spreading aloft spun about with light, a most magnificent timber. The portent was all covered with gold; beautiful gems appeared at the corner of the earth and there were also five upon the cross-beam. All the beautiful angels of the Lord throughout the universe gaze thereon; certainly it was not the gallows of a criminal there, but holy spirits gazed thereon, men across the earth and all this glorious creation.) (Bradley, page 160, lines 4-12).

Similar to that wondrous tree, the tree in Riddle 55 is adorned with gold, and it also bears the sign of the cross. The riddle even alludes to the harrowing of hell (see lines 5-7a), an apocryphal biblical story in which Jesus frees human souls from hell after his crucifixion. Thus, the riddle deliberately alludes to Christ and the cross upon which he died. And yet the last lines invite us to use our wits and find out hu se wudu hatte (what the wood is called), so there’s more to the riddle than just a short version of The Dream of the Rood. Our mysterious wrætlic wudutreow (wondrous forest-tree; line 3a) isn’t the same wood of which Christ’s cross was made, but we’re made to feel as if it is.

So what kind of wood is it then?

One early solution is “harp” (Trautmann, page 113), because a hall is where you’d play such an instrument. This solution has already been dismissed, but it’s still an interesting idea, so I’d like to comment on it briefly.



Watch Michael J. King demonstrating his replica early medieval lyre (a similar-ish instrument to the harp).

 

It makes perfect sense to have a harp in a hall. The different types of wood mentioned in the riddle also make more or less sense for a musical instrument, as Moritz Trautmann points out when he explains his suggestion. And yet he never explains the feower cynna (four different kinds) that are brought into the hall as the parts of a harp in line 2b. A harp is made of wood, sure. Gold decorations? Okay, maybe. But silver strings? Animal guts were originally used to make strings, and nowadays nylon or metal. But no silver strings. Trautmann also proposes a psalterium, which is a similar type of instrument, but the solution has the same issues. There are some riddles that seem to be about musical instruments in the Exeter collection, so it’s not unthinkable to find another riddle on this topic. Still, it doesn’t quite fit. For the moment, let’s just keep in mind that it’s a valuable object in a hall because that’s important.

Craig Williamson, in his translation of the Exeter riddles, assumes that the riddle’s clues can’t be explained nowadays because the cultural knowledge behind them is lost to us (Feast of Creatures, page 196). However, it’s hard to imagine how it should be possible to combine actual kinds of woods into another, holy kind of wood. Therefore I believe that we don’t understand the metaphor correctly, which is probably more of a problem than a loss of cultural knowledge. Let’s move on, then, and keep trying.

Other suggested solutions are shield or scabbard, but neither is cross-shaped (also summarized in Williamson, Old English Riddles, page 301). A cross has also been suggested, which would be a simple solution. Trautmann thinks this would be too simple to be satisfying (page 112).



The Ruthwell Cross (not made of wood, but still suitably early medieval!)

 

A gallows has also been suggested. If this is a gallows, it would again be an interesting parallel to The Dream of the Rood, where it’s explicitly stated that the wondrous tree is not a gallows tree. If Riddle 55 describes a gallows tree, it would propose a counterpart to the holy rood upon which Christ died: two wondrous trees, one holy, and one vile.

Liebermann reads the first letters of the types of wood in Riddle 55 as an acrostic for gealga to support this solution. Unfortunately, that requires a quite liberal reading of the letters, and it would be the only acrostic in the whole Exeter collection. Acrostics are not unheard of in riddles: for example, Aldhelm’s entire introduction to his riddles is an acrostic. However, that does not mean that they we can necessarily expect all stylistic devices used in Latin riddles in the Exeter riddles as well. So – even though it can’t be ruled out (and it wouldn’t be too different from the clues in runic riddles) – it’s fairly unlikely (Williamson, Old English Riddles, pages 301-2). However, it would explain the wulfheafedtreo from line 12: if outlaws are metaphorically called wolves, they would hang on a wolf’s head tree when they meet their deaths (Williamson, Feast of Creatures, page 196). The solution “gallows” doesn’t explain the four kinds of wood, though.

A sword rack has also been proposed, but that has the same issue. Furthermore, there is no evidence for the use of sword racks in early medieval England. Williamson doubts it and suggests it might rather be an ornamented box (Old English Riddles, pages 302-3).

John D. Niles has a different idea. He convincingly suggests that the riddle might not be about gallows or crosses of any sort at all, and that it might be a form of a hengen (basically anything on which you can…well…hang things). Thus, we’re talking about a cross-shaped rack with a mail-coat hanging from it, so it looks like a hanged man on the gallows (pages 73-80).



A mail-coat from the Museum of Bayeux from Wikimedia Commons (license: CC BY-SA 3.0).

 

Even Niles doesn’t explain what exactly is useful for a lord, though. The individual woods or the wonder-tree? Or the feower cynna (four different kinds) that are brought into the hall in line 2b? He raises the question as well, but leaves it open, for it doesn’t affect the solution he comes up with (page 64). Still, it makes me wonder whether we’re actually busting our chops trying to chew over the correct clues.

Anyway, what I like about this solution is that it means that Riddle 55 looks on the surface like a devotional poem, like a hymn, while its solution is a mundane object. It wouldn’t be the first riddle that reads not like a riddle but like another specific kind of poetry. I like to call this “literary mimicry,” and I love the Exeter riddles for it. The best examples I can think of are Riddle 6, which also sounds pretty hymnic and always reminds me of the hymn to the morning star and the sun in The Advent Lyrics; Riddles 3, 81, 88, and 93, which borrow elements from elegiac poems; Riddle 29, which reads like a mythical tale; and several riddles that read like miniature heroic poems, like most of the weapon riddles, or the very courageous animal in Riddle 15.

In addition, Riddle 55 is one of twenty-seven “witness” riddles: it’s written from a first-person perspective, but the narrator is a bystander rather than the solution itself. Some unknown person relates his or her experiences to the audience. Sound familiar? That’s what the dreamer in The Dream of the Rood does, too. These narrators don’t reveal much about themselves, the witness in Riddle 55 even less so than the dreamer in The Dream of the Rood. They’re not interesting for being narrators. They’re interesting because the mode of presenting a narrative as the account of an eye-witness affects the mood of a poem. This is part of the reason why both poems sound devout and make us imagine such vivid pictures like glorious golden trees in our heads.

I’ll leave you at that. I still don’t know what the wonder-tree is. Niles’ approach sounds most plausible to me, but even it can’t explain all the mysteries of this poem. I choose not to bother but to enjoy it for all its beauty, and think of all the splendid, otherworldly wonder-trees I can recall from popular culture. As my inclination to read the poem as another instance of “literary mimicry” might tell you, I assume that this is what the poet might have intended. It doesn’t matter that much which shape the mysterious wonder wood assumes. The poem describes what it’s like to look at it. I think we can enjoy that without actually knowing what we’re looking at.

Go hug a golden tree, folks!

Editorial Note: 

Since this post's publication, Sara Burdorff has suggested another possible solution: military standard or banner (OE segn). Full details of the article are below.

Notes:

References and Suggested Reading:

Adams, John F. “The Anglo-Saxon Riddles as Lyric Mode.” Criticism, vol. 7 (1965), pages 335-48.

Bradley, S. A. J., trans. Anglo-Saxon Poetry: An Anthology of Old English Poems in Prose Translation. Everyman: London, 1982.

Galpin, Canon Francis W. Old English Instruments of Music. 4th edition. New York: Barnes and Noble Inc., 1965.

Liebermann, F. “Das anglesächsische Rätsel 56: ‘Galgen als Waffenständer’.” Archiv, vol. 114 (1905), pages 163-4.

Niles, John D. Old English Enigmatic Poems and the Play of the Texts. Studies in the Early Middle Ages 13. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2006.

Stewart, Ann Harleman. “Old English Riddle 47 as Stylistic Parody.” Papers on Language and Literature, vol. 11 (1975), pages 227-41.

Swanton, Michael James, ed. The Dream of the Rood. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996. Print. Exeter Medieval English Texts and Studies.

Trautmann, Moritz, ed. Die Altenglischen Rätsel. Heidelberg: Carl Winters Universitätsbuchhandlung, 1915.

Tupper, Frederick, Jr., ed. The Riddles of the Exeter Book. Boston: Ginn and Company, 1910.

Williamson, Craig, trans. A Feast of Creatures: Anglo-Saxon Riddle-Songs. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982.

Williamson, Craig, ed. The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977.

Published after this post was written, but worth a read!:

Burdorff, Sara. "Segn of the Times: A New Solution for Exeter Riddle 55." Anglo-Saxon England, vol. 48 (2019), pages 63-91.

Tags: anglo saxon exeter book riddles old english solutions riddle 55 franziska wenzel

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Exeter Riddle 56

MEGANCAVELL

Date: Wed 05 Oct 2016

Matching Commentaries: Commentary for Exeter Riddle 56

Original text:

Ic wæs þær inne      þær ic ane geseah

winnende wiht      wido bennegean,

holt hweorfende;      heaþoglemma feng,

deopra dolga.      Daroþas wæron

5     weo þære wihte,      ond se wudu searwum

fæste gebunden.      Hyre fota wæs

biidfæst oþer,      oþer bisgo dreag,

leolc on lyfte,      hwilum londe neah.

Treow wæs getenge      þam þær torhtan stod

10     leafum bihongen.      Ic lafe geseah

minum hlaforde,      þær hæleð druncon,

þara flana,(1)       on flet beran.

Translation:

I was inside there, where I saw

a wooden object wounding a certain struggling creature,

the turning wood; it received battle-wounds,

deep gashes. Darts were

5     woeful to that creature, and the wood skillfully

bound fast. One of its feet was

held fixed, the other endured affliction,

leapt into the air, sometimes near the land.

A tree, hung about by leaves, was near

10     to that bright thing [which] stood there. I saw the leavings

of those arrows, carried onto the floor

to my lord, where the warriors drank.

Click to show riddle solution?

Loom, Lathe

Notes:

This riddle appears on folio 114r 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 208.

Note that this edition numbers the text Riddle 54: Craig Williamson, ed., The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), page 101.

Textual Note:

(1) The manuscript reads þara flan here. I have followed Williamson’s emendation and explanation (pages 208 and 307), since Krapp and Dobbie unnecessarily supply an extra word in their edition: þara flana geweorc.

Tags: anglo saxon exeter book riddles old english solutions riddle 56

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Commentary for Exeter Riddle 56

MEGANCAVELL

Date: Fri 14 Oct 2016

Matching Riddle: Exeter Riddle 56

I love Riddle 56 for many, many, many, many, many, many reasons, and I’ve been working on it on and off for about eight years, so BE PREPARED for me to unleash my inner geek. Disclaimer: this inner geek is possibly not quite as well hidden as I sometimes believe it to be. At least I’m self-aware.

So. Riddle 56. Why do I love it so much? Well, one of the reasons is that it’s very hard to solve without knowledge of early medieval material culture and craft. And the harder to solve ones are always more fun, non? The reason we need a bit of insight into early medieval craft is because the two most convincing solutions are Loom and Lathe.

“Tell us more, Megan,” I hear you cry! And I will. Oooooooh, I will.

Let’s start with Loom. One of the main types of weaving looms that early medieval folks used is called the warp-weighted loom (sounds ominous!). Here’s what it would’ve looked like.



Drawing of a loom from Montelius’s Civilisation of Sweden in Heathen Times, p. 160, via Roth’s Ancient Egyptian and Greek Looms, p. 34



Reconstructed loom on display at a Viking craft fair in York, 2010

This sort of loom would’ve stood upright and likely leaned against a wall. It had a large number of vertical threads – together referred to as the “warp” – dangling down to where they were tied in bunches. These threads would be tied not just to each other, but also to clay weights, which kept tension in the threads. Why so tense? Well, the weaver would be hard at work rapidly pulling and pushing the threads forward and backward by means of a horizontal bar partway down the front of the loom (known as a “heddle rod”). When one group of threads was pulled forward, the weaver would insert the horizontal (weft) threads. Then she’d push that lot back and insert the weft thread through a second batch of warp-threads. The tension stops the threads from getting all stuck together and ensures some easy peasy weaving (weavy?). The weights, by the way, often looked like doughnuts. I’m not even joking. Behold some doughnut-like weights!:



Photo of early medieval loom weights at Bedford Museum from Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Doughnutty loom-weights aside, how does this sort of loom map onto the action of Riddle 56? Let’s start with the struggling creature: that appears to be the cloth mid-production. Its swinging and fixed feet seem to be the two separate groups of warp-threads (i.e. the ones pulled back and forth, and the ones that stay hanging at the back). The turning wood is probably a bar holding the finished fabric, which could be rotated to allow for weaving a longer piece of cloth than the actual size of the loom would normally allow.

There’s plenty of room to interpret this set-up as a bit torture-y, and John D. Niles has argued for this very assessment when analysing Old English descriptions of devices for hanging and stretching criminals (pages 61-84). And, of course, all those references to darts and bound wood that together inflict heaþoglemma (battle-wounds) and deopra dolga (deep gashes) in lines 3-4 of the riddle point quite clearly to a context of physical pain and punishment. This is helped along by the fact that the weaver would use a wooden or sometimes iron sword-shaped beater (or batten) to thwack the woven threads up and into place, as well as small picks to straighten out the occasional stubborn patch. Several surviving beaters were actually fashioned out of blunt swords or spear-heads (Walton Rogers, pages 33-4). So, there are definitely some violent undertones to textile-making.



Photo of a 9th-century sword beater from the Portable Antiquities Scheme (license CC BY 2.0).

In the Old Norse tradition, this violence is very noticeable. The poem Darraðarljóð (which can be found in Njáls saga) describes in great and gruesome detail a group of Valkyries weaving on a loom made from human body-parts. Likewise, Jómsvíkinga saga involves a dream sequence of the same sort. Their loom weights aren’t delicious doughnuts at all, but severed heads. Which is obviously gross.

All this means that violence is part and parcel of at least some northern medieval textile traditions. The question is, then, am I just a warped individual (get the pun? get it? get it?) or do I have a more nuanced reason for being attracted to Riddle 56, this most violent of riddles?

Well, I like to believe the latter is true. I personally think the combination of creative construction and violent destruction makes this riddle absolutely fascinating. Even if we don’t take the thing-being-made as a textile (some people have problems with that tree at the end of the poem, though it’s also been explained as a distaff standing near the loom, like in the drawing above), we’re certainly dealing with a riddle that describes a craft. And imagining a skilled craftsperson as a violent tormentor is, frankly, solid gold to anyone interested in ecocriticism (i.e. approaching literary texts by focusing on their representation of the natural world). Whether this is wool or flax twisted into a new shape – or whether it’s a completely different, wooden object – the raw material would once have been a part of the early medieval environment.

Which leads me to the second option for the riddle’s solution: Lathe. This is one that I become more and more convinced by each time I read the riddle. I know I’ve spent years talking about the poem in the light of textiles research, but a little part of me thinks that maybe, just maybe, the lathe reading works…even better. Here’s a video of a reconstructed pole lathe in process:



So, what we have here is a very clear case of one foot being fixed (i.e. the bit of the wooden pole stuck into the ground) and one swinging (i.e. the bit of the wooden pole that’s pulled and released by the foot treadle). Riddle 56’s reference to turning wood is especially apt, since a lathe is used to rotate wood while the operator shaves and grinds it into a particular shape (this is what’s going on behind the group of onlookers). A metal blade is also an essential part of the process, which explains all those battle-wounds. What do we make of that leafy tree in line 9, though? Well, this could potentially refer to the use of a fresh, green tree, which would be necessary for the lathe to keep its springiness.

And, finally, the creature that’s brought into the hall – well in this case it would be a bowl, cup or another dish made from wood. In the case of the loom, it would be a high-status textile, perhaps an item of clothing or a wall-hanging for decking out the hall. Either would be appropriate in the context of a feast for warriors. But, of course, a cup would add to the drinking party atmosphere in a pretty obvious way.

Unfortunately, I haven’t read many interpretations of this riddle that accept Lathe as the solution. Drawing on the passing suggestion of early riddle-scholars, Hans Pinsker and Waltraud Ziegler solve it this way in their German edition of the riddles, but they don’t go into a great detail (pages 277-8). This is too bad, because I think someone out there could make a real go of this. Maybe it could be you? If so, be sure to get in touch, eh?

Notes:

References and Suggested Reading:

Cavell, Megan. “Looming Danger and Dangerous Looms: Violence and Weaving in Exeter Book Riddle 56.” Leeds Studies in English, vol. 42 (2011), pages 29-42. Online here.

Cavell, Megan. Weaving Words and Binding Bodies: The Poetics of Human Experience in Old English Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016.

Clegg Hyer, Maren. “Riddles of Anglo-Saxon England.” In Encyclopedia of Medieval Dress and Textiles of the British Isles, c. 450–1450. Edited by Gale R. Owen-Crocker, Elizabeth Coatsworth and Maria Hayward. Leiden: Brill, 2012.

Erhardt-Siebold, Erika von. “The Old English Loom Riddles.” In Philologica: The Malone Anniversary Studies. Edited by Thomas A. Kirkby and Henry Bosley Woolf. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1949, pages 9-17.

Montelius, Oscar. Civilisation of Sweden in Heathen Times. Translated by Rev. F.H. Woods. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 1888.

Niles, John D. Old English Enigmatic Poems and the Play of the Texts. Turnhout: Brepols, 2006.

Pinsker, Hans, and Waltraud Ziegler, eds. Die altenglischen Rätsel des Exeterbuchs. Heidelberg: Winter, 1985.

Roth, H. Ling. Ancient Egyptian and Greek Looms. Halifax: Bankfield Museum,  1913. Online at Project Gutenberg.

Walton Rogers, Penelope. Cloth and Clothing in Early Anglo-Saxon England: AD 450–700. York: Council for British Archaeology, 2006.

More:

You may also enjoy this conversation with Sharif Adams about Riddle 56 and pole lathes/wood turning on our Youtube channel! Available here.

Tags: anglo saxon exeter book riddles old english solutions riddle 56

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Exeter Riddle 57

MEGANCAVELL

Date: Thu 12 Jan 2017

Matching Commentaries: Commentary for Exeter Riddle 57

Today’s translation post is by Michael J. Warren. He has just completed his PhD on birds in medieval English poetry at Royal Holloway, where he is now a visiting lecturer. His new projects continue to focus on animal studies and ecocritical approaches to the natural world. Check out Michael’s blog, The Compleat Birder, here.

Original text:

Ðeos lyft byreð      lytle wihte

ofer beorghleoþa.      Þa sind blace swiþe,

swearte salopade.      Sanges rope

heapum ferað,      hlude cirmað,

tredað bearonæssas,      hwilum burgsalo

niþþa bearna.      Nemnað hy sylfe.

Translation:

The air bears little creatures

over the hillsides. They are very black,

swarthy, dark-coated. Bountiful of song

they journey in groups, cry loudly,

tread the woody headlands, sometimes the town-dwellings

of the sons of men. They name themselves.

Click to show riddle solution?

Swifts, Swallows, Crows, Jackdaws, Starlings, House martins, Letters, Musical notes, Gnats, Stormclouds, Hailstones, Raindrops, Bees, Midges, Damned souls, or Demons

Notes:

There is an interactive Riddle 57 activity available here.

This riddle appears on folios 114r-114v 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 209.

Note that this edition numbers the text Riddle 55: Craig Williamson, ed., The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), page 101.

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Commentary for Exeter Riddle 57

MEGANCAVELL

Date: Tue 24 Jan 2017

Matching Riddle: Exeter Riddle 57

This commentary post is once again by Michael J. Warren from Royal Holloway. Take it away, Michael!
 
This has to be my favourite of all the Old English riddles, for two reasons. Firstly, the solution is probably a bird (my specialism), but even more intriguing is the fact that we just don’t know what the solution is. The Exeter Book riddles are renowned, of course, for their enigmatic absence of answers in the manuscript (unlike the various Anglo-Latin examples), but this is one of the few that still lacks a solution with general or near unanimous agreement. Scholars are still debating the possible solutions for this little critter; the only thing most scholars agree on is that the “subject is quite firmly assigned to the category bird” (Barley, page 169).
For John D. Niles, the “most likely self-naming black bird we are ever likely to snare” (page 129) is the crow, but a wide number of avian suspects have been recommended over the years, and various other “flying” answers as well (see the solutions following my translation of this riddle). For starters, then, what this pithy riddle does is demonstrate very nicely how this collection of conundrums is still playing out its effects over a thousand years after the poems were written down: they continue to tease us with a curious blend of obfuscation and illumination. As it turns out, this is something birds characteristically do as well. I like to think it’s no accident that birds are probably the answer to Riddle 57: a devious subject at the heart of a devious genre that continually escapes identification and finality.
Pretty much all European corvid species have been suggested as solutions to Riddle 57, but only jackdaws and rooks habitually gather in groups. Photo (by Bob Jones) of jackdaws from Wikipedia Commons (license: CC BY-SA 2.0).
When we compare the mystery subjects of this Riddle 57 with the other bird riddles (Riddles 7, 8, 9, 10 and 24), there are enough similarities to make me think that some sort of bird must be the answer. These creatures hlude cirmað “cry loudly” (like the nightingale in Riddle 8, line 3b), the lyft byreð “the air bears” the birds in the same way it does the swan (Riddle 7, lines 4b-5a) and barnacle goose (Riddle 10, line 9b), and both the swan and the birds of Riddle 57 tredað “tread” when they alight, inhabiting opposing human and nonhuman territories. These nifty birds also inhabit what I call the “sometimes” motif – hwilum “sometimes” (line 5b) behaviours typify these creatures. As we’ll see below, birds are known for this sort of unpredictability (see Riddle 24’s jay for a whole load of hwilum!).
The final half line also seems like it really should be a clincher: Nemnað hy sylfe. The grammar of this line allows us to read it in two ways: either “Name them yourselves,” which fits the usual instruction from the riddles’ subjects (“Say what I am called”), or the now more popular reading, “They name themselves.” The latter might point us, then, to song as a clue. Certainly in other bird riddles, sound can be an important indicator, and many Old English bird names recorded in the glossaries onomatopoeically mimic song. On this basis, Dieter Bitterli has argued for an etymological tactic for solving the bird riddles: the diversity of the bird’s call in Riddle 8 leads us to nightingale (OE niht “night” + galan “to sing”) as evident in the poem’s synonym æfensceop “evening-singer” (line 5a). Similarly, Riddle 7 leads us to Old English swan (mute swan) through the use of paronomasia (word play on similar sounding words): the various /sw/ words direct us towards the name of the bird and its characteristic wing-music in flight.
Photo of swifts (by Keta) – a popular solution to Riddle 57 – from Wikipedia Commons (license: CC BY-SA 3.0).
Bitterli’s theory is convincing. The problem is that while birds do conveniently sometimes spell out their names for us with their calls, they also have a tendency to transform, obscure and avoid identity. Take Riddle 24, for instance. We know what the answer is here, because it’s spelt out for us in runes which we must translate into Old English (higoræ “jay”), but the most distinctive sonic feature of this bird is that its tell-tale song keeps changing – it’s defined, apparently, according to the fact that it sounds like just about everything else. And birds generally in the Exeter Book riddles are characterised by their continual changing: the swan (Riddle 7) is paradoxically silent and loud, and travels afar. The cuckoo (Riddle 9), also a far-traveller, grows to be a huge bird that far outsizes the nest of its host and its usurped earlier identity, so moving from cuckoo to host-species to cuckoo again. The barnacle goose (Riddle 10) undergoes a remarkable metamorphosis, emerging and deriving from another creature entirely, and, like two other birds, does a disappearing act for half the year. The nightingale (Riddle 8) and jay (Riddle 24) change their voices as they please, also appropriating new identities.
Readers will undoubtedly continue to propose answers to Riddle 57. I’m for swift or swallow as it goes, but, actually, I think this might be beside the point. Perhaps we shouldn’t be in the business of seeking an answer at all. In fact, my point is rather to suggest that these secretive lytle wihte “little creatures” (line 1b) achieve their impact so well because they can’t be identified. This might seem counterintuitive on the face of it, but it’s borne out by other early medieval writings on birds. Indeed, scholars across the medieval period stress that what is most birdy about birds is their transformative abilities. Or to put it another way, what most defines birds is their habit of avoiding definition – they’re intrinsically unknowable in some respects, escapologists.
The most popular encyclopaedist of the late Middle Ages, Bartholomew the Englishman, notes repeatedly that there’s an in between-ness apparent in their very substance, þat beþ bytwene þe tweye elementis þat beþ most heuy and most liȝt (that is between the two elements that are most heavy and most light) (Seymour, page 596). Bartholomew’s immediate source, though, is one of the most influential texts of the early medieval period – Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies. In his introduction to birds, Isidore remarks how “They are called birds (avis) because they do not have set paths (via), but travel by means of pathless (avia) ways” (Barney, page 264). In his commentary on Riddle 51 on this site, Britt Mize makes a great case for the importance of paths or tracks (a motif that occurs in a number of the riddles). In Riddle 51, birds and (inky) paths are associable. As Britt suggests, “a reader, just like a hunter or tracker, must carefully observe and interpret the signs he or she finds, endeavouring to stay with them, going where they lead in pursuit of a goal.”
Page of from Isidore’s Etymologies (8^thcentury), Brussels, Royal Library of Belgium, from Wikipedia Commons (public domain)
In Isidore’s statement, however, and in Riddle 57, this pursuit turns out to be rather more complicated. Birds outfly our pursuit, and overwhelm us with their great variety and multitude: “There is a single word for birds, but various kinds, for just as they differ among themselves in appearance, so do they differ also in the diversity of their natures” (Isidore, in Barney, page 263). Names and categories, it is implied, just aren’t sufficient to account for all the bird species that there are, even if we could know them all, which we can’t, because birds can disappear without signe neiþer tokene (sign nor token) (Bartholomew, in Seymour, page 596) – it’s impossible for mankind “to penetrate all the wildernesses of India and Ethiopia and Scythia, so as to know the kinds of birds and their differentiating characteristics” (Isidore, in Barney, page 263). These sentiments are echoed in a 10^th century Latin poem on birdsong:
Quis volucrum species numeret, quis nomina discat?

Mille avium cantus, vocum discrimina mille.

Nec nostrum (fateor) tantas discernere voces.

(De cantibus avium, lines 1-3, in Buecheler and Riese, page 197)
(Whoever counts the types of birds, who learns their names? There are a thousand songs of birds, a thousand different voices. Nor do I, myself, claim to distinguish such voices.)
These sorts of issues seem to me to be at the heart of Riddle 57. The brief description identifies something which is very bird-like (particularly in comparison with the other bird riddles), and yet avoids offering us anything more precise. They force us to inhabit a space somewhere between knowledge and ignorance, just as the birds themselves sometimes dwell with niþþa bearna “the sons of men” (line 6a) and sometimes move beyond our boundaries to the bearonæssas “woody headlands” (lines 5a). Whatever its immediate sources or contexts may have been, Riddle 57 manifests the sorts of anxieties over naming birds and their characteristics evident in texts like Isidore’s – these are birds that apparently name themselves, but (still) can’t be named.
All of this avian mystery points up another potential, related concern of this poem. Birds remind us how frequently these poems cause us to go round in circles: the switchback evasions of the dark birds in Riddle 57 place them firmly in line with an important effect of the Exeter Book riddles’ strategies – they expose the limits of knowledge, even within texts that urge us to exceed limitations and certify uncertainties. In my reading of Riddle 57, then, two important aspects come together – birds and elusive answers – to emphasise the sophistication of these texts that are so often about testing the limits of knowledge. Birds, that is, might actually be employed purposefully in this riddle and in other bird riddles, because like the mysterious and evasive solutions that we’re required to guess at through complex linguistic play, they’re continuously seen to escape definition or certainties.
In her discussion of wonder in the Exeter Book riddles, Patricia Dailey observes that by “forcing us to think through the means of how we come to know the creature described in language,” these texts highlight “a link in epistemological knowing and a limit inscribed in naming” (page 464). In other words, even if we can correctly guess a solution, a name can only get us so far – there is still a gap between the mysterious thing itself and the name we choose to give it; mysteries still exist. Birds, I think, show us this particularly well. In Riddle 57, the grammatical ambiguity of line 6b demands, on the one hand, that we partake in the typical naming game, and on the other states that the birds, in fact, name themselves, neither requiring our intervention (as namers), nor, in fact, allowing us this privilege. Naming birds doesn’t satisfactorily encompass their ever-changing, diverse identities, and particularly not when we can’t saga “say” a name at all.

Editorial note: if you'd like to play with Riddle 57 some more, check out this interactive activity here.

Notes:

References and Suggested Reading:

Barley, Nigel F. “Structural Aspects of the Anglo-Saxon Riddle.” Semiotica, vol. 10 (1974), pages 143-75.

Barney, Stephen A., and others, trans. The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Bitterli, Dieter. Say What I Am Called: The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book and the Anglo-Latin Tradition. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009.

Buecheler, Franciscus, and Alexander Riese, eds. Anthologia Latina, sive Poesis Latinae supplementum. 2 vols. Leipzig: B. G. Teubneri, 1869-1926. Translation from Latin by Virginia Warren.

Dailey, Patricia. “Riddles, Wonder and Responsiveness in Anglo-Saxon Literature.” In The Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature. Edited by Clare A. Lees. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, pages 451-72.

Krapp, George Philip, and Elliott van Kirk Dobbie, eds. The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records. 6 vols. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1931-1953.

Niles, John D. Old English Enigmatic Poems and the Play of the Texts. Turnhout: Brepols, 2006.

Seymour, M. C., and others, ed. On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.

Tags: anglo saxon exeter book riddles old english solutions riddle 57 micheal warren

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Exeter Riddle 58

VICTORIASYMONS

Date: Thu 12 Jan 2017

Matching Commentaries: Commentary for Exeter Riddle 58

Original text:

Ic wat anfete      ellen dreogan

wiht on wonge.      Wide ne fereð,

ne fela rideð,      ne fleogan mæg

þurh scirne dæg,      ne hie scip fereð,

5     naca nægledbord;      nyt bið hwæþre

hyre mondryhtne      monegum tidum.

Hafað hefigne steort,      heafod lytel,

tungan lange,      toð nænigne,

isernes dæl;      eorðgræf pæþeð.

10     Wætan ne swelgeþ      ne wiht iteþ,

foþres ne gitsað,      fereð oft swa þeah

lagoflod on lyfte;      life ne gielpeð,

hlafordes gifum,      hyreð swa þeana

þeodne sinum.      Þry sind in naman

15     ryhte runstafas,      þara is Rad foran.

Translation:

I know a one-footed thing, working with strength,

a creature on the plain. It does not travel far,

nor rides much, nor can it fly

through the bright day, no ship ferries it,

5     no nail-planked boat; it is however a benefit

to its master at many times.

It has a heavy tail, a little head,

a long tongue, not any teeth,

a share of iron; it treads an earth-hole.

10     It swallows no water nor eats a thing,

nor desires food, often however it ferries

a flood into the air; it boasts not of life

of a lord’s gifts, nonetheless it obeys

its own ruler. In its name are three

15     right rune-letters, with ‘rad’ at the front.

Click to show riddle solution?

Well-sweep

Notes:

This riddle appears on folio 114v 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 209.

Note that this edition numbers the text Riddle 56: Craig Williamson, ed., The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), pages 101-2.

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Commentary for Exeter Riddle 58

VICTORIASYMONS

Date: Mon 06 Feb 2017

Matching Riddle: Exeter Riddle 58

Well, well, well. Here we go with Riddle 58.
Early critics had little trouble solving this riddle, because apparently early critics were far better versed in basic irrigation technology than I am. Have you ever seen one of these?

 
Photograph (by Rafał Klisowski) from Wikimedia Commons (license: CC BY-SA 3.0).

No, neither have I. It’s a well-sweep, also known as a shaduf or shadoof, a counterpoise lift, a well-pole, or a swep. Also the creature described in Riddle 58 (proposed long ago by Holthausen).
It’s actually a pretty snazzy piece of machinery. That tall vertical pole (the anfot of the riddle) creates a base on which the diagonal rod can pivot. The diagonal rod is weighted on the one end (the heavy tail), and the other (the small head) is attached to a long rope (the tongue), carrying a bucket. When you want water, you pull on the rope to lower the bucket; when it’s full (and heavy), you simply let go – the counterweight does the job of raising the water so you don’t have to. Genius.
Ok, so here’s my first question. Why isn’t this one of the obscene riddles? How is it that early medieval folks found more suggestive imagery in an onion than this particular contraption? Maybe it was just too easy. Low-hanging fruit and all that. Moving on.
Any fan of the Exeter Book riddles knows how fond they are of playing positive and negative attributes against one another: things are in turn portrayed by what they are and what they’re not. But I can’t think of another riddle that manages the balance between the two quite as skilfully as this one. Starting at the start (where else?) we get a very important detail: our wiht is one-footed. But that’s left behind almost immediately, as we move onto a list of the things it doesn’t do. This creature doesn’t get around much on its lone foot: not by riding, nor flying, nor sailing on boats – and that’s pretty much all the travel options covered. But then we’re back to what it is, or at least what it has. Its body parts include a tail, a head, a tongue – but no teeth – and a measure of iron. It doesn’t drink, but it does carry water; it doesn’t boast of life but it does serve its master (nice iteration of the implement trope here; see Neville).
There’s a kind of rhythm that develops as we read through this flip-flopping description. The repeated use of ne gives a secondary alliteration on n-, particularly in lines 2-4, but it’s only in line 5 that we find n- carrying metrical alliteration, and that finishes by describing something that the creature is (a nyt “benefit”) rather than what it isn’t. We could compare these oscillations to the see-sawing motion of the well sweep in action. Or at least, I assume we could. I’ve only seen them in pictures.



A well-sweep in “action” from Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

These oscillations continue across the poem. The verb ferian (to carry) is used three times (lines 2, 4, 11). The first two are negative: this is a creature that neither moves itself nor is carried by ships. But then in line 11 we’re told that it fereð (carries) water – and it does it a lot. Water, too, is evoked both positively and negatively. This creature doesn’t drink (line 10a), but it does raise lagoflod (water: line 12a). It’s also a wiht (thing: line 2a), but it ne wiht iteþ (doesn’t eat a thing: line 10b). No nægledbord (nail-boarded) boat carries it (line 5a), but it does have its own share of isern (iron: line 9a), and we might think here of the visual and material affinities between a boat and a bucket. We’re told it doesn’t travel – either on the earth, in the air, or over water (lines 2-4). And yet later we find it traversing an earthen hole in order to lift water into the air (lines 9-12).
I said that critics have had little trouble solving Riddle 58 and that’s true. Sort of. The thing being described does seem to answer to all the attributes of a well-sweep. But what’s the Old English for well-sweep? Apparently it’s a three letter word with rad at the start. Unfortunately, no early medieval person ever bothered to write it down for us.
I ask because the riddle ends not by describing its subject, but by describing the name of its subject. Specifically, a name comprised of three ryhte runstafas (right rune-letters), and starting with rad (lines 14b-15). Runes aren’t all that common in the Exeter Book riddles, and when they are used they tend to be something of a showpiece: either introduced early (as in Riddles 19, 42 and 64), or discussed over several lines (as in Riddle 24, and also the other three I just mentioned). But Dieter Bitterli isn’t wrong when he describes these closing lines as rather abrupt (page 98). I guess if there’s anything better than runes, it’s surprise runes. The rune here is indicated using its name rather than its letter (a technique we’ve also seen in Riddle 42). In the manuscript there’s an accent over rad, perhaps as a hint at the word’s significance.
On its surface the runic conundrum that ends Riddle 58 is as straightforward as they come. Rad (riding) is the name of the rune ᚱ (‘r’). There’s only so many three-lettered words, and not even most of them start with r-. How hard can it be? Early critics settled on rod (rod). Job done.
Others, though, took the puzzle another way: they put the element rad– at the start of a three-letter word to make a compound, like radlim (riding-pole) or radpyt (riding-pit, well) (see Blakeley and Grein). Williamson notes, entirely in passing, that radrod (riding-rod, sweep?) may be a better fit, since “it is the pole and not the pit that is the subject” (page 312).


And yet, still not about sex. Photograph (by Jan Stubenitzky) from Wikimedia Commons (license: CC BY-SA 3.0).

Hang on, though. Radrod? That works both ways! It’s a compound comprising rad– and a second element, with that second element being a three lettered word starting with r- (Murphy, page 65). It even captures tonally the poem’s see-sawing rhythm. Better yet, because runic letters can stand for their names as well as their phonemes, it’s possible to write rad-rod in runes as ᚱ-ᚱᚩᛞ. As Niles points out (page 92), this construction contains only three distinct letters (with ᚱ repeated), and it starts with rad. So much for a creature that ne fela rideð (doesn’t ride much: line 3a), and yes I do think that’s an intentional joke by the riddle’s author (see Bitterli, page 105). By the end of the poem there’s quite a lot riding on ᚱ.
I’ll stop now.
The runic conundrum at the end of this riddle is uniquely peripheral, but it raises an interesting question. When we solve riddles, do we do it with objects or with words?
I have to confess, the term “well-sweep” meant not a thing to me the first time I read it; my “aha!” moment only came when I saw the photo at the top of this post. Niles argues for the importance of answering the riddles in their own language (that is, Old English rather than modern English), but the riddles themselves tend to place much greater emphasis on their subjects’ physical attributes than on their names. Many of the riddles begin by describing the form of a thing (ic seah “I saw,” or ic eom “I am”). Then again, many also end by asking us to say or to name their subject (saga hwæt ic hatte “say what I am called”).
So, have we solved Riddle 58 when we’ve identified an object that fits all the clues in its first fourteen lines, or when we’ve found an Old English word that answers the letter game in its final two? Is this riddle asking us to think about a thing in the world, or about the word used to signify that thing?


Bonus question: does it matter that the word radrod is a modern invention not attested anywhere in the Old English corpus? Photograph (by Andrzej Otrębsk) from Wikimedia Commons (license: CC BY-SA 3.0).

Notes:

References and Suggested Reading:

Bitterli, Dieter. Say What I Am Called: The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book and the Anglo-Latin Riddle Tradition. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009.

Blakeley, L. “Riddles 22 and 58 of the Exeter Book.” Review of English Studies, vol. 9 (1958), pages 241-252.

Grein, Christian W. M. “Kleine Mittheilungen.” Germania, vol. 10 (1865), pages 305-310.

Holthausen, Ferdinand. “Beiträge zur Erklärung und Textkritik altenglischer Dichtungen.” Indogermanische Forschungen, vol. 4 (1894), pages 379-88.

Murphy, Patrick J. Unriddling the Exeter Riddles. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011.

Neville, Jennifer. “The Unexpected Treasure of the ‘Implement Trope’: Hierarchical Relationships in the Old English Riddles”. Review of English Studies, vol. 62 (2011), pages 505-519.

Niles, John D. Old English Enigmatic Poems and the Play of the Texts. Turnhout: Brepols, 2006.

Symons, Victoria. Runes and Roman Letters in Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016.

Williamson, Craig, ed. The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977.

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Exeter Riddle 59

MEGANCAVELL

Date: Sun 19 Feb 2017

Matching Commentaries: Commentary for Exeter Riddle 59

The following translation post is by Brett Roscoe, Assistant Professor at The King’s University in Alberta, and researcher of medieval wisdom literature. Take it away, Brett!

Original text:

Ic seah in healle      hring gyldenne

men sceawian,       modum gleawe,

ferþþum frode.      Friþospede bæd

god nergende       gæste sinum

5      se þe wende wriþan;       word æfter cwæð

hring on hyrede,      hælend nemde

tillfremmendra.      Him torhte in gemynd

his dryhtnes naman      dumba brohte

ond in eagna gesihð,      gif þæs æþelan

10      goldes tacen       ongietan cuþe

ond dryhtnes dolg,      don swa þæs beages

benne cwædon.      Ne mæg þære bene

æniges monnes      ungefullodre

godes ealdorburg      gæst gesecan,

15       rodera ceastre.       Ræde, se þe wille,

hu ðæs wrætlican      wunda cwæden

hringes to hæleþum,       þa he in healle wæs

wylted ond wended       wloncra folmum.

Translation:

I saw in the hall men behold

a golden ring, prudent in mind,

wise in spirit. He who turned the ring

asked for abundant peace for his spirit

5      from God the Saviour.(1) Then it spoke a word,

the ring in the gathering. It named the Healer

of those who do good. Clearly into memory

and into the sight of their eyes it brought, without words,

the Lord’s name, if one could perceive

10      the meaning of that noble, golden sign

and the wounds of the Lord, and do as the wounds

of the ring said. The prayer

of any man being unfulfilled,(2)

his soul cannot reach God’s royal city,

15      the fortress of the heavens. Let him who wishes explain

how the wounds of that curious ring

spoke to men, when, in the hall,

it was rolled and turned in the hands of the bold ones.

Click to show riddle solution?

Chalice

Notes:

This riddle appears on folios 114v-115r 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), pages 209-10.

Note that this edition numbers the text Riddle 57: Craig Williamson, ed., The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), pages 102-3.

Translation Notes:

(1) Here I follow Craig Williamson in translating god nergende as the object of the clause. Given the meaning of biddan (to pray, entreat, ask), I don’t think it likely that God is the subject. After all, who would God pray to?

(2) P. J. Cosijn suggests changing the manuscript ungefullodre to ungefullodra, translating it “of the unbaptized” (“Anglosaxonica. IV,” Beitrage, vol. 23 (1898), pages 109-30, at 130), the sense then being that the prayer of the unbaptized will not get them to heaven. The translation given here adopts the suggestion made by Frederick Tupper, Jr., The Riddles of the Exeter Book (Boston: Ginn, 1910), page 198.

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Commentary for Exeter Riddle 59

MEGANCAVELL

Date: Mon 27 Feb 2017

Matching Riddle: Exeter Riddle 59

This week’s commentary post is once again from Brett Roscoe of The King’s University, Alberta.
 
Imagine a hall where a lord and his warriors are drinking and laughing and generally just having a good time. The lord rewards a fighter with a ring, and the warrior proudly sends it around the table for all to admire (it is wylted ond wended wloncra folmum (rolled and turned in the hands of bold fighters)). This is the picture painted by Riddle 59, and at first it seems like a standard heroic scene. But there are some oddities that suggest there is more to this poem than meets the eye (cue eerie music). If the men are just looking at a ring, what makes them gleaw (prudent) and frod (wise) (lines 2b-3a)? And if the ring is a tacen (sign/emblem/symbol), what is it a sign of? Though in the foreground of this riddle we see warriors drinking in a hall, in the background we can hear the faint sounds of a priest’s sermon or a church choir.
The solution to Riddle 59 is “chalice,” which means the riddle is closely related to Riddle 48, whose possible solutions are “paten,” “chalice,” or “sacramental vessel” (though Megan thinks “paten” most likely). When Jesus instituted what we now know as the Lord’s Supper (or the Eucharist or Communion), he took a cup of wine and offered it to his disciples, and he said, “Drink ye all of this. For this is my blood of the new testament, which shall be shed for many unto remission of sins” (Bibite ex hoc omnes. Hic est enim sanguis meus novi testamenti, qui pro multis effundetur in remissionem peccatorum; Matthew 26:27-28). So now we know why the ring (the chalice) is called a golden tacen (sign/symbol/emblem). To the church, this chalice is more than just a cup; it is a sign of Jesus’ death and of God’s gift of forgiveness. It is meant for all of Jesus’ disciples, and so it is wylted and wended (rolled and turned) from hand to hand, the riddler’s tricky way of saying the cup is passed from person to person.


Here’s a nice, little, early medieval chalice from Hexham Abbey 
(photo courtesy of C.J.W. Brown).
Now, the only time I stare at my mug is when I’m bored, and I don’t think that’s why the men gaze at this cup (lines 1-3a). So what is it about the cup that makes people stare? It probably helps that the cup is wounded (lines 11-12). I might not stare at any old cup, but I might look twice at a bleeding one. The riddle shows us a cup that is similar to Jesus, who was wounded on the cross. But how is a cup wounded? By chipping or denting it? By throwing it across the room and then stomping on it? Craig Williamson suggests that the wounds on the cup refer to engravings in the gold gilding (page 313). To help us see what he means, here is a picture of the Tassilo Chalice, a cup from the 8th century:
Photo (by Andreas Püttmann) from Wikipedia Commons (licence: CC BY-SA 2.0 de).
 The chalice is engraved (or wounded) with pictures of Jesus and the four Evangelists, the Virgin Mary, and John the Baptist, and all the portraits are surrounded by a beautiful interlace pattern. If I had a cup like this, I’d probably stare at it too! The people gazing at the chalice, though, are doing more than admiring the artwork. They are called gleaw (prudent) and frod (wise) because by looking at the cup they are meditating on Christ’s death. Through its engravings, the cup brings a clear image of Christ into the gazers’ eyes and minds (lines 7b-9a), helping them contemplate the grace offered by God to those who take and drink.
If lines 12b-15a (“The prayer of any man…”) confuse you, you are in good company. Even scholars don’t agree on what they mean. I’ve followed the translation suggested by Frederick Tupper Jr., which should clarify a bit, but the lines are still somewhat cryptic. Let’s start by looking at the phrase þære bene (the prayer). Though Tupper translates þære as “the,” it could also be translated “that,” and so we can assume the phrase þære bene refers to a specific prayer that has already been mentioned in the riddle. If we move backwards through the riddle looking for a prayer, it doesn’t take long before we find one. Two, actually. The first is in 3b-5a (“He who turned the ring asked for abundant peace…”), and the second in lines 5b-7a (when the ring speaks and names “the Healer”). The first prayer is from a Christian who drinks from the chalice, and the second prayer is from the chalice itself, possibly on behalf of the drinker. Since both are probably praying for grace for the drinker, we might say that they are both part of the same prayer, “that prayer” mentioned in line 12b. And if that prayer were to go ungefullodre (unfulfilled), if the person were not granted grace through the drinking of the wine, or, in other words, if the person did not have the gift of the eucharist and the sacrifice it represents, then he or she would never reach heaven.
So what’s in a cup? Wine, blood, and a lot of religious meaning. Looking up from writing this post, I suddenly find myself disappointed in my coffee mug.

Notes:

References and Suggested Reading:

Allen, Michael J. B., and Daniel G. Calder, trans. Sources and Analogues of Old English Poetry: The Major Latin Texts in Translation. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1976.

Cosjin, P. J. “Anglosaxonica. IV.” Beitrage, vol. 23 (1898), pages 109-30.

Krapp, George Philip, and Elliott van Kirk Dobbie, eds. The Exeter Book. New York: Columbia University Press, 1936, pages 209-10, 351-52.

Tupper, Frederick Jr., ed. The Riddles of the Exeter Book. Boston: Ginn, 1910.

Williamson, Craig, ed. The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977, pages 102, 313-14.

Tags: anglo saxon exeter book riddles old english solutions riddle 59 brett roscoe

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Exeter Riddle 60

MEGANCAVELL

Date: Fri 17 Mar 2017

Matching Commentaries: Commentary for Exeter Riddle 60

Riddle 60’s translation is once again by Brett Roscoe of The King’s University, Alberta. (thanks, Brett!)

Original text:

Ic wæs be sonde,      sæwealle neah,

æt merefaroþe,*      minum gewunade

frumstaþole fæst;       fea ænig wæs

monna cynnes,      þæt minne þær

5    on anæde      eard beheolde,

ac mec uhtna gehwam     yð sio brune

lagufæðme beleolc.      Lyt ic wende

þæt ic ær oþþe sið      æfre sceolde

ofer meodubence       muðleas sprecan,

10     wordum wrixlan.       Þæt is wundres dæl,

on sefan searolic      þam þe swylc ne conn,

hu mec seaxes ord       ond seo swiþre hond,

eorles ingeþonc      on ord somod,

þingum geþydan,       þæt ic wiþ þe sceolde

15     for unc anum twam       ærendspræce

abeodan bealdlice,      swa hit beorna ma

uncre wordcwidas     widdor ne mænden.**

Translation:

I was by the shore, near the sea-cliff,

with the surging of the waves.* I remained

fixed at my first place; there were few

of mankind who there,

5     in that solitude, could see my home,

but each morning the wave in its dark,

watery embrace enclosed me. Little did I know

that ever before or after,

I – mouth-less – across the mead-bench would have to speak,

10     exchange words. It is a kind of wonder

to one who does not know such things,

how, with a clever mind, the point of a knife,

the right hand and the thought of man together in a point,

press me for this purpose: that I with you should,

15     in the presence of us two alone,

boldly declare my message, so that no men

should spread our words more widely.**

Click to show riddle solution?

Reed (pen), Rune staff

Notes:

This riddle appears on folios 122v-123r 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 225.

Note that this edition numbers the text Riddle 58: Craig Williamson, ed., The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), page 103.

Tags: anglo saxon exeter book riddles old english solutions riddle 60 brett roscoe

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Exeter Riddle 65
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Exeter Riddle 72

Commentary for Exeter Riddle 60

MEGANCAVELL

Date: Mon 24 Apr 2017

Matching Riddle: Exeter Riddle 60

Brett Roscoe from The King’s University, Alberta leads us through Riddle 60’s commentary:
 
You know the kinds of kids who always have to be different? They stand when others sit and lie down when others stand. They dye their hair purple, and when the rest of the class dyes their hair purple they shave their heads. Well, that’s the kind of riddle we’re looking at. Almost all the other riddles in the Exeter Book fall into two large groups, 1-59 and 61-95. But Riddles 30b and 60? They refuse to conform, appearing instead in the middle of a series of Old English elegies (such as The Wife’s Lament and The Ruin) and religious poems (such as The Descent into Hell and Pharaoh). So the first question we need to ask is whether or not Riddle 60 is successful in its quest for independence.
Here’s the problem: the riddle is on folio 122b of the Exeter Book, and on the very next page (123a) is a poem called The Husband’s Message. Because of the proximity of these two works and similarity in phrasing, some have suggested that they actually belong together and should be seen as a single poem. If Riddle 60 were a teenager, I’m sure s/he would have thrown something at me as I wrote that last sentence, but it’s true. And those who want to see Riddle 60 together with The Husband’s Message usually hold that the answer to the riddle is a “rune staff.”


Artwork (by Olaus Magnus) from Wikipedia Commons (public domain).

This is a woodcut from Olaus Magnus’ description of Nordic history, customs, and folklore in a book called Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus (1555). It shows two wise men, each holding a rune-staff. And here is a picture of a rune-staff from 17^th century Norway:
Photo (by Roede) from Wikimedia Commons (license CC BY-SA 3.0).
The Husband’s Message is, as the title suggests, a message from a husband to his wife. He was exiled, and so he has not seen his wife in years, but now he decides it’s safe to send her a messenger. The messenger finds the woman and tries to convince her to come to where her husband now lives. The messenger presumably shows her a rune-staff (or stick or stone) with the runes S, R, EA, W, M engraved on it, a cryptic record of earlier vows made by the husband and wife. In relation to Riddle 60, the most important figure is not the husband or wife, and not even the message. It’s the messenger. The Husband’s Message begins,
Nu ic onsundran þe   secgan wille

[. . . . . . . . ] treocyn   ic tudre aweox;

in mec æld[. . . . . . . . . .] sceal   ellor londes

settan [. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .]   sealte streamas

[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ]sse. (lines 1-4a)
(“Now will I tell to you who live apart

How I grew up in youth among the trees.

On me must sons of men write messages,

Send me from foreign lands across the waves.”)

(trans. by Hamer, page 79)
It may be just me, but these lines sound very much like a riddle. And if they are a riddle, the clear solution would be a rune-staff, which is made from wood and engraved with messages. Admittedly, the messenger could just be a human who carries a rune-staff, and The Husband’s Message may not be a riddle at all. Though scholarly consensus favours the latter, either reading is possible. Seen in the context of Riddle 60, the rune-staff solution does seem tempting. A rune-staff speaks or conveys a message even though it is muðleas (mouth-less; line 9); it is pressed (or carved) with a knife that is guided by human hands and intent (lines 12-14a); and it can also be used to convey secret messages (lines 14b-17). In fact, in the Old Norse-Icelandic Völsunga saga Guðrun uses runes for that very purpose—she sends a secret runic message to her brothers to warn them of a plot against their lives (ch. 35). (Unfortunately Guðrun’s messenger is not as trustworthy as the one in The Husband’s Message. If you want to find out what happens, feel free to read the story for yourself—you can download a text and translation here). It would seem that a rune-staff fits a lot of the details of the riddle.
But what, then, are we to do about lines 1-7? These lines tell us that the solution to the riddle lives near the shore, that it is so close to the sea it actually touches the waters. F. A. Blackburn suggests that the lines describe a swamp, and the rune-staff is made from the wood of a willow or a swamp cedar (page 7), but this seems like a stretch to me. And what are we to make of the fact that the riddle solution speaks ofer meodubence (across the meadbench; line 9a)? As we will see in Riddle 67, written texts were often read out loud in public settings in the Middle Ages, but the last lines of this riddle suggest the message is a secret. Who would read a secret message out loud in a meadhall? (unless the person were exceptionally bad at keeping secrets!)
In fact, the present consensus is not to read Riddle 60 as part of The Husband’s Message. In modern editions and translations, the two are printed as separate works. And most now agree that the answer to Riddle 60 is a reed or reed pen. A possible source or influence can be found in Symphosius’ Latin Enigma 2 (called Harundo or Reed):
Dulcis amica dei, semper vicina profundis,

Suave cano Musis, nigro perfusa colore

Nuntia sum linguae digitis signata ministris.
(Sweet mistress of a god, the steep bank’s neighbor, sweetly singing for the Muses; when drenched with black, I am the tongue’s messenger by guiding fingers pressed.) (text and trans. from Ohl, page 36)
The interesting thing about Symphosius’ riddle is that the reed takes on a number of forms: first it is the nymph Syrinx, who, according to Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Book 1, lines 689-721), is pursued by the god Pan and transformed into a reed; then it is just a plain old reed along the bank; then it starts to sing, probably in the form of a reed flute; and then, as a reed pen, it writes. We’re dealing with quite a multi-talented reed here.
Similarly, Riddle 60 also describes a reed near the bank (lines 1-7), and then it goes on to talk of the reed as a tool. A knife is used to carve the tip of a reed pen, which is then gripped by a hand and guided by human intent as it is pressed onto parchment (lines 12-14a). The ic (I) of lines 14b-17 is the reed pen, and the þe (you) could be the reader of the lines (the person to whom the pen, through its writing, “speaks”), or it could even be the writer, in whose presence the pen “declares” its message (i.e. puts the message on paper or parchment). The pen speaks ofer meodubence (across the mead-bench) by writing books that are subsequently read aloud or discussed at meals. This last point may seem odd, given that the end of the riddle focuses on secrecy. But we have to keep in mind that, like Symphosius’ riddle, Riddle 60 lists more than one use of the reed. In fact, lines 7b-10a may not even be about a reed pen, but about a reed flute, played during meals as entertainment. Capturing all of these reed forms in a single English word is difficult, which is why I’ve added the word “pen” in parentheses to the solution. John Niles suggests that instead of answering Riddle 60 with a Modern English word, we answer it with an Old English one, hreod, which is flexible enough to mean reed, reed pen, or reed flute (pages 131-2).
So please join me in congratulating Riddle 60! It seems that it has achieved its independence after all. But it must keep its guard up—the rune-staff solution still lurks in dark places, just waiting to latch on to this fascinating riddle.

Notes:

References and Suggested Reading:

Blackburn, F. A. “The Husband’s Message and the Accompanying Riddles of the Exeter Book.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, vol. 3 (1901), pages 1-13.

Hamer, Richard, trans. “The Husband’s Message.” A Choice of Anglo-Saxon Verse. London: Faber and Faber, 1970, pages 79-81.

Krapp, George Philip, and Elliott van Kirk Dobbie, eds. The Exeter Book. New York: Columbia University Press, 1936, pages 225, 361-62.

Niles, John D. Old English Enigmatic Poems and the Play of Texts. Turnhout: Brepols, 2006.

Ohl, Raymond. The Enigmas of Symphosius. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1928. (an online version of Ohl’s editions and translations can be found here)

Tags: anglo saxon exeter book riddles old english solutions riddle 60 brett roscoe old norse

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Commentary for Exeter Riddle 67

Exeter Riddle 61

MEGANCAVELL

Date: Mon 10 Apr 2017

Matching Commentaries: Commentary for Exeter Riddle 61

Original text:

Oft mec fæste bileac      freolicu meowle,

ides on earce,     hwilum up ateah

folmum sinum      ond frean sealde,

holdum þeodne,     swa hio haten wæs.

5     Siðþan me on hreþre      heafod sticade,

nioþan upweardne,     on nearo fegde.

Gif þæs ondfengan     ellen dohte,

mec frætwedne      fyllan sceolde

ruwes nathwæt.      Ræd hwæt ic mæne.

Translation:

Often a noble woman, a lady, locked me

fast in a chest, sometimes she drew me up

with her hands and gave me to her husband,

her loyal lord, as she was bid.

5     Then he stuck his head in the heart of me,

upward from beneath, fitted it in the tight space.

If the strength of the receiver was suitable,

something shaggy had to fill

me, the adorned one. Determine what I mean.

Click to show riddle solution?

Shirt/Kirtle/Tunic, Garment, Helmet

Notes:

This riddle appears on folio 124v 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 229.

Note that this edition numbers the text Riddle 59: Craig Williamson, ed., The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), pages 103-4.

Tags: anglo saxon exeter book riddles old english solutions riddle 61

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Commentary for Exeter Riddle 61
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Exeter Riddle 61 in Croatian / na hrvatskom

MEGANCAVELL

Date: Tue 04 Jan 2022

Denis Ferhatović was born in a city that no longer exists, in a country that no longer exists. He is the author of Borrowed Objects and the Art of Poetry: Spolia in Old English Verse (2019). He loves to read, think, and write about languages, travels, translation, queerness, art, cats, food, and many other things.

Denis Ferhatović je rođen u gradu koji više ne postoji, u državi koja više ne postoji. Autor je knjige Pozajmljeni predmeti i umijeće poezije: Spolije u staroengleskom pjesništvu (2019). Voli da čita, razmišlja i piše o jezicima, putovanjima, prevođenju, nastranosti, umjetnosti, mačkama, hrani i mnogočemu drugome.

Original text:

Oft mec fæste bileac      freolicu meowle,

ides on earce,     hwilum up ateah

folmum sinum      ond frean sealde,

holdum þeodne,     swa hio haten wæs.

5     Siðþan me on hreþre      heafod sticade,

nioþan upweardne,     on nearo fegde.

Gif þæs ondfengan     ellen dohte,

mec frætwedne      fyllan sceolde

ruwes nathwæt.      Ræd hwæt ic mæne.

Translation:

Često bi me zakjučala     gospa divna,

Šjora u kašun        kadagod me izvadila

Rukaman svojin    i dala šjoru

Virnom jubjenon    kad bi o’ nje zatražija.

On bi onda u srid    mene glavu stavija

Od doli prema gori    u tisno misto.

Ako bi snaga junaka    dostatna bila,

Mene bi napituranu    ispunilo cilu

Kosmato neč.        Nu veli ča mislin.

Click to show riddle solution?

kaciga, košulja, žensko spolovilo

Tags: exeter book old english riddle 61 denis ferhatovic

Commentary for Exeter Riddle 61

MEGANCAVELL

Date: Mon 24 Apr 2017

Matching Riddle: Exeter Riddle 61

Do you find early medieval men’s fashions particularly risqué? Well, whoever composed Riddle 61 sure seems to have done! That’s right, folks: it’s another riddle that’s chock-a-block full of double entendre.
The solution to Riddle 61 hasn’t proved as problematic as some of the other Exeter Book poems. Scholars have decided that it’s either a helmet (OE helm) or a shirt – though kirtle/tunic (OE cyrtel/tunece) are less anachronistic and more in line with early medieval style. You can see this sort of get-up in the following snippet from the Bayeux Tapestry:
Edward the Confessor and his messengers hold a meeting on the Bayeux Tapestry, via Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain).
And here’s a nice helmet for good measure:
The 8^th-century Coppergate Helmet as photographed by York Museums Trust via Wikimedia Commons (license: CC BY-SA 4.0).
It’s totally up to you whether you prefer a garment or helmet; I don’t have any strong opinions on this one. The long and the short of it is: whatever we’re talking about has to be an item with an opening that a man can put his head into or through. It has to come to rest on something hairy – could be his head, could be his chest. And it’s got to be small enough to store in a box, and not so heavy that the lady of the house couldn’t remove it by herself. I’m NOT saying that early medieval women couldn’t be strong and/or badass (have you ever tried setting up a loom? that’s some strenuous labour right there), but some of that later medieval plate armour looks cumbersome at best. But this isn’t what we’re talking about – I seem to have gone off topic already!
Anywho, it also sounds like the object in question is a tad on the valuable side, since it’s kept locked away and it claims to be frætwedne (adorned). This very brief reference to adornment is what reminds us we’re dealing with a constructed object instead of a sexual encounter. This was before vajazzling, after all. Though Sarah Higley suggests the text may be hinting at contraceptive items (and reminds us that we don’t know an awful lot about such things in early medieval England (pages 48-50)), I think it’s safe to say that it would be pretty impractical to adorn whatever sorts of things were used.
But enough about ancient prophylactics! (is a sentence I never thought I’d write) “Are there any other references to domestic scenes of husbands and wives and handing out garments in Old English?,” I hear you asking. Good question. There are indeed. There are indeed. The obvious passage is from the wisdom poem Maxims I (full translation here), which refers to a Frisian woman washing her husband’s clothes, giving him new ones and perhaps a little more than that (wink wink, nudge nudge). Why she has to be Frisian is beyond me (maybe just because it alliterates with flota (ship)?).
Here’s the passage I’m talking about:
                      leof wilcuma

Frysan wife,      þonne flota stondeð;

biþ his ceol cumen      ond hyre ceorl to ham,

agen ætgeofa,      ond heo hine in laðaþ,

wæsceð his warig hrægl     ond him syleþ wæde niwe,

liþ him on londe      þæs his lufu bædeð. (lines 94b-9b)
(the dear one [is] welcome to his Frisian wife, when the ship stands; his boat has come home and her man, her own food-giver, and she calls him in, washes his dirty clothing and gives him new garments, gives him on land what his love requires.)
All I can think about when I read this poem is that this guy must smell horrible if he’s just coming back from a sea-voyage with little-to-no spare clothing. No wonder his wife is keen to get him into clean kit before the marital reunion commences.
But notice the similarities between this poem and Riddle 61 too: the husband-wife relationship, sexual implications, garment-giving. I wonder if his clothes are kept in a box too?
Speaking of which, the chest that holds the garment or helmet in Riddle 61 is also interesting because, as Edith Whitehurst Williams reminds us, it’s pretty impossible to apply it in a literal way to the bawdy reading of the poem (page 141). She reckons it’s “a metaphoric statement for the lady’s great modesty which is set aside only in the proper circumstance – when her lord commands” (page 141).
At this point you, like me, may be a bit annoyed with the unequal gender relations of this riddle. What’s all this commanding and bidding nonsense? I mean, of course we don’t want to impose an anachronistic view of women’s agency onto this very-very-very old poem, but still. If you do happen to find this aspect problematic, then I would suggest taking a look-see at Melanie Heyworth’s fascinating and insightful interpretation of this riddle. Hers is a nice and balanced, and fully contextualised reading of the poem (pages 179-80). Importantly, she points out that the woman gives/entrusts (the verb is sellan) her sexuality to her partner only gif (if) his ellen (strength/courage) is dohte (suitable/worthy). Now, I had translated line 7 as a reference to sexual potency – a crass sort of “if he can get it up and keep it going” sort of thing – but I quite like Heyworth’s version, since it suggests that both partners in this relationship are bringing something to the table. She’ll have sex with him only if he’s worthy, in other words. Admittedly, this comes across as a deeply conservative, heteronormative view of the world, but it was a very different world, so let’s try to keep our morals and theirs separate. Again, as Heyworth points out, Riddle 61 shows us an idealised marriage (page 180). In fact, she says its aim is to prescribe behaviour: “to urge its audience to similar conduct to that of the riddle-wife and her husband” (page 180).
Did everyone listen? Well, no, of course they didn’t. Would you need to prescribe behaviour if everyone was already on board?
We can find a great example of a woman who reputedly did NOT lock her sexuality away and entrust it only to her husband on the Bayeux Tapestry once again:
Panel depicting Ælfgyva and a cleric with naughty connotations, via Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain).
You may be confused about what’s going on in this picture. They’re fully clothed, so what’s all the bother about? Look closer. And look down and to the left. Behold the tiny naked man squatting at the bottom of this high-status textile! Most likely embroidered by English women during the transition from English to Norman rule, the Bayeux Tapestry depicts all manner of political and martial escapades relating to the famous conquest of 1066.
Now we don’t know the full story of this picture, partly because there’s no verb to tell us what’s going on: the Latin title just says Ubi unus clericus et Ælfgyva (Where a certain cleric and Ælfgifu). We also don’t know for certain who this panel depicts because the Old English name Ælfgifu, meaning “Elf-Gift,” was pretty common (for a good guess, check out J. L. Laynesmith’s article and podcast below). But even without that knowledge, we can say is that the picture seems to refer to some sort of scandal. That cleric probably shouldn’t be reaching through the archway to touch Ælfgifu’s face (is he caressing her? hitting her?). And the fact that the little naked man is mirroring the cleric, at least in his upper body and arms, strongly implies that the two are connected.
So, to tie this discussion up, I’d like to point out that it wasn’t just riddlers and scribes who revelled in double entendre. Early medieval women – in this case embroiderers – were also known to author some rather saucy stories. Intriguing ones too.
Bet you’ll never look at the Bayeux Tapestry with a straight face again.

Notes:

References and Suggested Reading:

Heyworth, Melanie. “Perceptions of Marriage in Exeter Book Riddles 20 and 61.” Studia Neophilologica, vol. 79 (2007), pages 171-84.

Higley, Sarah L. “The Wanton Hand: Reading and Reaching into Grammars and Bodies in Old English Riddle 12.” In Naked Before God: Uncovering the Body in Anglo-Saxon England. Edited by Benjamin C. Withers and Jonathan Wilcox. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2003, pages 29-59. Available online via Higley’s academia.edu page.

Laynesmith, J. L. “The Bayeux Tapestry: A Canterbury Tale.” History Today, vol. 62, issue 10 (Oct. 2012). http://www.historytoday.com/jl-laynesmith/bayeux-tapestry-canterbury-tale (podcast freely available here)

Whitehurst Williams, Edith. “What’s So New about the Sexual Revolution? Some Comments on Anglo-Saxon Attitudes toward Sexuality in Women Based on Four Exeter Book Riddles.” In New Readings on Women in Old English Literature. Edited by Helen Damico and Alexandra Hennessey Olsen. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990, pages 137-45.

Tags: anglo saxon exeter book riddles old english solutions riddle 61

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Exeter Riddle 62

VICTORIASYMONS

Date: Wed 10 May 2017

Matching Commentaries: Commentary for Exeter Riddle 62

Original text:

Ic eom heard ond scearp,     [i]ngonges strong,

forðsiþes from,     frean unforcuð,

wade under wambe     ond me weg sylfa

ryhtne geryme.     Rinc bið on ofeste,

5     se mec on þyð     æftanweardne,

hæleð mid hrægle;     hwilum ut tyhð

of hole hatne,     hwilum eft fareð

on nearo nathwær,     nydeþ swiþe

suþerne secg.     Saga hwæt ic hatte.

Translation:

I am hard and pointed, strong going in,

firm departing, not unfamiliar to a lord.

I go beneath the belly, and myself open

a fitting passage. The warrior is in haste,

5     who presses me from behind,

the hero in garments; sometimes he draws me out,

hot from the hole, sometimes again ventures

into the confines of… I know not where. He vigorously urges,

the man from the south. Say what I am called.

Click to show riddle solution?

Poker, Boring tool, Phallus

Notes:

This riddle appears on folios 124v-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 229.

Note that this edition numbers the text Riddle 60: Craig Williamson, ed., The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), page 104.

Tags: anglo saxon exeter book riddles old english solutions riddle 62

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Commentary for Exeter Riddle 62

VICTORIASYMONS

Date: Mon 22 May 2017

Matching Riddle: Exeter Riddle 62

Before we start, there’s something we need to clear up about Riddle 62. This is one of those riddles with two solutions. First, it’s a description of an implement of some sort – probably a poker or a wood-working tool. But, and bear with me here, there’s actually another solution at play. If you think about it really carefully you can maybe see how this riddle might also be describing a penis. I just wanted to get that out the way, in case anyone failed to pick up on the incredibly subtle imagery.
Now, you might not have seen this straight away. You might have read this riddle through and thought: “Ah yes. A poker. That is certainly what is being described here. That and nothing else.”


Not this kind of poker. The kind that goes in a fire. Photo: Graeme Main/MOD via Wikimedia Commons (Open Government Licence).

In which case, well done. It might be that. It might also be a borer or some other woodworking tool. Picture something like this:


Source: Cassell’s Carpentry and Joinery via Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain).

There’s really not much in it: both are hard, and pointed, and get pushed into things. The former gets hot from the fire. The latter gets hot from friction. It’s a little tricky to account for the womb that our speaker goes beneath if we’re picturing a borer. This is why I think poker makes the better fit. The womb would be an oven, or furnace, or fireplace. Winfried Rudolf has discussed the sexual imagery of ovens in relation to Riddle 45 (pages 511-13; see also Salvador-Bello page 360), and here are some fun images of medieval ovens being suggestively… poked. And with that, let us segue smoothly into our riddle’s less salubrious meanings. Because, believe it or not, a hard and pointy instrument that gets poked repeatedly into someplace warm and inviting lends itself to a different sort of solution entirely.


Still not this. Photo: Graeme Main/MOD via Wikimedia Commons (Open Government Licence).

Yes, we’re continuing the double-entendres from Riddle 61 (and there’s more to come in Riddle 63). The combination of everyday object with sexy subtext is one we’ve seen more than a few times in the Exeter Book, and this riddle pulls no punches with the suggestive imagery. In fact, almost every line includes vocabulary repeated in those other euphemistic riddles.  Our speaker is heard ond scearp and strong; the speaker of Riddle 44 is stiþ ond heard (line 3a), and strong appears in Riddle 54 (line 9b) and 87 (line 3a). The hrægl worn by our speaker’s wielder finds a number of parallels (44.4, 45.4, 54.4), as does the womb (37.1, 87.1) that our mystery subject goes beneath, and the nearo (25.10, 61.6) hol (44.5) it occupies. But just in case we missed all that, the poet drops the word nathwær into the closing lines. This – and the related term nathwæt – is a solid staple of the double-entendre genre, making an appearance in Riddles 25, 45, 54 and 61.
So not only is this riddle suggestive, it’s laden with language used suggestively in other riddles as well. “Keep some mystery in the bedroom” is an idea our poet apparently failed to internalise when composing this little vignette.


“Hey guys! Guys! Have you heard the one about the poker?” Image from Wikimedia Commons (photographic reproduction of work in Public Domain).

In fact, the poet comes perilously close to giving the game away in lines 6b-8a. The subject of the two hwilum clauses must be understood as the hæleð mid hrægle from line 6a. That’s fine for the first clause, as the man pulls his “poker” out from the “fire.” But then in the second clause it isn’t the poker that eft fareð but the man himself. Hang on, why would the man be putting himself back into the fire? As noted by Murphy (page 203), and Williamson before him (page 323), this makes no sense. Unless the tool this man is wielding isn’t really a poker at all, but a part of his own body, and he isn’t really venturing into a fire but into a… nathwær. Just as we think we’ve caught the poet – and the man – in the act, the curtain comes and we’re back in the realm of the implied. “I couldn’t possibly say where,” demurs the speaker, “and no I don’t know what you’re smirking about.”
So even in a riddle as on-the-nose as this, there’s room for ambiguity. My favourite is forðsiþ in line 2a. It means “departure,” but forðsiþ can also refer to “death.” In renaissance literature, “death” is a familiar euphemism for orgasm (the “little death,” or “petite mort”), and it’s likely the metaphor was established at least by Chaucer’s day (Quinn, page 220). Think of Troilus “fainting” in Criseyde’s bed. Is this reference to the speaker’s forðsiþ an earlier iteration of the same euphemism? It might be. That’s the problem with suggestive language – it needs both the riddler and the riddlee to be on the same page, culturally speaking.
Speaking of which, what should we make of the speaker describing itself as scearp? It’s not the most obvious adjective to associate with a penis, right? It’s also not one we might expect based on other riddles of this nature (Riddle 44, for example, pairs heard with stiþ). As well as the modern sense “sharp”, scearp can also mean “keen” (think of something being “sharp sighted”). That sense does fit well enough with the rest of the riddle, which emphasises haste (line 4b) and urgency (line 8b). But scearp is also used to describe weapons – particularly swords – often enough that the suggestion of violence inevitably rears its head here (see Riddle 20). What’s really striking about scearp is that it introduces a perspective that’s otherwise very notably absent from this poem. It’s the person receiving the penis – rather than the penis itself or the man it’s attached to – who would experience its “sharpness”. Throughout the whole poem, scearp is the only insight we get into that other perspective, and (for modern readers at least) it gives a discomforting glimpse into a very different experience of an encounter otherwise dominated by the man’s pride in his own sexual performance.
Which leads us to the biggest scholarly sticking point of Riddle 62: the suþerne secg (line 9a). All the way through the poem, the speaker refers to its wielder in lofty and heroic terms, as frea, rinc, and hæleð. What, then, are we supposed to make of the man’s southern origins? Tupper takes it to mean that our “hero” is actually  a slave, akin to the “dark Welsh” who populate various other euphemistic riddles (page 203). On the other hand, Baum thinks the reference implies a skilled craftsman, as opposed to a “cruder man from northern districts” (page 59). Williamson argues that the line is euphemistic (probably a safe bet, all things considered), providing an oblique reference to “the direction of the thrust” (page 323).
Murphy proposes something a bit different (page 203). Rather than taking the suþerne secg as the subject – parallel to the hæleð mid hrægle – he instead argues that it’s the object: “He [the man] earnestly urges on his southern fellow [by which is understood the penis]”. It’s a fun interpretation, and it makes the riddle’s closing half-line especially bold. Having just referred to itself with a euphemistic epithet, the speaker then demands that we be the one to “say what I’m called.” A “tool,” an “implement,” a “southern fellow”? Don’t know what you’re talking about. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some “fires” to “poke.”


Wellcome Images via Wikimedia Commons (Creative Commons licence 4.0).

Notes:

References and further reading

Condren, Edward I. Chaucer from Prentice to Poet: The Metaphor of Love in Dream Visions and Troilus and Criseyde. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008.

Murphy, Patrick. Unriddling the Exeter Riddles. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011.

Rudolf, Winfried. “Riddling and Reading: Iconicity and Logogriphs in Exeter Book Riddles 23 and 45.” Anglia-Zeitschrift für englische Philologie, vol. 130, issue 4 (2012), pages 499-525.

Salvador-Bello, Mercedes. “The Sexual Riddle Type in Aldhelm’s Enigmata, the Exeter Book, and Early Medieval Latin”. Philological Quarterly, vol. 90, issue 4 (2011), pages 357-85.

Tanke, John W. “Wonfeax wale: Ideology and Figuration in the Sexual Riddles of the Exeter Book.” In Class and Gender in Early English Literature. Edited by Britton J. Harwood and Gillian R. Overing. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994, pages 21-42.

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Commentary for Exeter Riddle 63

Exeter Riddle 63

MEGANCAVELL

Date: Mon 29 May 2017

Matching Commentaries: Commentary for Exeter Riddle 63

FYI, the manuscript is pretty damaged here, so the last few lines are impossible to reconstruct. Try to enjoy nonetheless!

Original text:

Oft ic secga      seledreame sceal

fægre onþeon,      þonne ic eom forð boren

glæd mid golde,      þær guman drincað.

Hwilum mec on cofan     cysseð muþe

5     tillic esne,     þær wit tu beoþ,

fæðme on folm[. . . . .]grum þyð,

wyrceð his willa[. . . . . .]ð l[. . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . .] fulre,     þonne ic forð cyme

[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .]

10     Ne mæg ic þy miþan,       [. . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .]an on leohte

[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .]

swylce eac bið sona

. .]r[.]te getacnad,     hwæt me to [. . . .

15     . . . .]leas rinc,     þa unc geryde wæs.

Translation:

Often I must prosper fairly among the hall-joy

of men, when I am carried forth

shining with gold, where men drink.

Sometimes a capable servant kisses me on the mouth

5     in a chamber where we two are,

my bosom in his hand, presses me with fingers,

works his will . . .

. . . full, when I come forth

. . .

10     Nor can I conceal that . . .

. . . in the light

. . .

so too is it immediately . . .

indicated, what from me . . .

. . . less warrior, when it was pleasant for us two.

Click to show riddle solution?

Glass beaker, Flask, Flute

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), pages 229-30.

Note that this edition numbers the text Riddle 61: Craig Williamson, ed., The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), pages 104-5.

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Commentary for Exeter Riddle 63

MEGANCAVELL

Date: Wed 07 Jun 2017

Matching Riddle: Exeter Riddle 63

If Riddle 63 has anything to teach us, it’s that people with hot pokers SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED NEAR MANUSCRIPTS! Sorry…got a bit shouty there. All those years of pent-up scholarly rage have to take their toll at some point. I’m fine now.
Ahem.
So, Riddle 63. This is the first of many very damaged riddles that we’re going to be working through from this point on. They’re damaged because – as you might have guessed – there’s a long, diagonal burn from where someone put a hot poker or fiery brand on the back of the Exeter Book.

A photo of the damage to this page of the manuscript (folio 125r). I am *very* grateful to the manuscripts and archives team for providing this Exeter Cathedral Library photo (reproduced by courtesy of the Dean and Chapter of Exeter)
 
Even with the damage, we can still have a conversation about Riddle 63 because – thankfully – several of its opening lines are intact, and intriguing hints survive further on in the poem. We have enough information, for example, to have a convincing stab at the solution, which seems to be a glass beaker or perhaps glæs-fæt in Old English (though early solvers also suggested “flute” and “flask”).
Glass beakers are a fairly common find in early medieval graves, and there’s pretty good evidence for solving the riddle this way. Some of this evidence comes from within the poem: the references to a servant handling and kissing the object from line 4 onward suggest that it’s a drinking vessel. And the object’s statement Ne mæg ic þy miþan (Nor can I conceal that) in line 10a implies that it’s transparent.

A claw beaker from Ringlemere Farm, Kent, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain). You can find out more about it here.
 
I suppose you could argue that the holes in flutes would make concealing anything difficult too, and of course kissing and pressing with fingers are entirely relevant for a musical instrument of that kind. But we also have evidence for reading Riddle 63 as glass beaker that comes from outside of the poem. There’s a really, really, really useful parallel in one of the Anglo-Latin riddles written by the 7th/8th-century abbot and bishop Aldhelm. His Enigma 80, Calix Vitreus (Glass Chalice) has a similar reference to grasping with fingers and kissing, you see:
Nempe uolunt plures collum constringere dextra

Et pulchre digitis lubricum comprendere corpus;

Sed mentes muto, dum labris oscula trado

Dulcia compressis impendens basia buccis,

Atque pedum gressus titubantes sterno ruina.

(Glorie, vol. 133, page 496, lines 5-9)

(Truly, many wish to squeeze my neck with their right hand and seize my beautifully sinuous body with their fingers;  but I change their minds, while I deliver kisses to their lips,  dispensing sweet kisses to puckered mouths, and yet I throw off the faltering steps of their feet in a fall.)
This is a deeply disturbing vision of a sexual encounter loaded with complicated and competing power dynamics. There’s a lot of kissing here, sure, but there’s also a hint of violence in that term constringere, which can mean “to embrace,” but also “to bind/constrict” (hence I’ve gone for “squeeze”). Fifty Shades of Græg, amirite?
And while it’s the drinkers who initially want to inflict this violence on the drinking vessel, the vessel ends up turning the tables, so to speak, when the drinkers become so intoxicated that they fall over. This leads Mercedes Salvador-Bello to discuss Aldhelm’s Latin riddle in the light of early medieval views on prostitution: she argues convincingly that the riddle imagines a prostitute bringing about the downfall of a man through a combination of sexual charms and excessive wine (page 371). She also suggests the poem might be alluding to the apocalyptic Whore of Babylon from the biblical Book of Revelation (see also Magennis, page 519). Heavy stuff.
I also think there’s a possible pun here in the verb muto (I change), which could easily be confused for the terribly rude noun muto (penis). I mean, it doesn’t work grammatically, but it might have caused an embarrassed titter nonetheless.
And this leads us back again to Riddle 63, which is equally euphemistic but with a very different tone (at least as far as we can tell!). There are certainly similarities between the Latin and Old English riddles – both involve what my mum used to call “kissy face, pressy bod” (otherwise known as “sex”). Riddle 63’s reference to the human in the riddle who wyrceð his willa (works his will) in line 7a should look familiar from Riddle 54 (line 6a). And þyð (presses) also appears in sexual contexts in Riddle 12 (line 8b), Riddle 21 (line 5b) and Riddle 62 (5a).
But what I quite like about this riddle is that the sexual act is clearly a mutually enjoyable one: þa unc geryde wæs (when it was pleasant for us two) (line 15b). Look at that glorious dual pronoun! Unc! “Us two”! This glass beaker is properly into it.
Still, there are some issues with class that muddy the waters a bit. Patrick Murphy reminds us that this riddle – like so many others – confuses the matter of who is serving whom; this speaker is “habitually compelled to serve men but also itself attended at times by a tillic esne ‘useful servant’” (page 205). While the one handling the glass beaker is imagined as a person from a lower status background, the beaker itself is glæd mid golde (shining with gold). This level of bling makes me wonder if Riddle 63’s glass beaker is – rather than a prostitute, like in Aldhelm’s Latin riddle – imagined as a high-status person having a fling with a servant in a private chamber. On a literal level, this gold could be metal ornamentation around the glass beaker (Salvador-Bello, page 372), but figuratively it might point to all those wondrous arm- and neck-rings that bedeck elite lords, ladies and retainers in heroic poetry.
I want to point to one final comparison before I close up shop for the day. A few weeks ago at a fascinating lecture about fear, Alice Jorgensen from Trinity College Dublin reminded me about a funny little reference in Blickling Homily 10, Þisses Middangeardes Ende Neah Is. This late 10th-century homily says that the dead will be forced to reveal their sins on Judgement Day:
biþ þonne se flæschoma ascyred swa glæs, ne mæg ðæs unrihtes beon awiht bedigled (Morris, pages 109/11)

(then the flesh will be as clear as glass, nor may its wrongs be at all concealed).
Isn’t this too perfect? The glassy flesh of sinners will no longer be able to conceal sins when the end of the world comes! Just like the glass of a beaker reveals what’s in it. Those sins – whether consensual sex between people of different social ranks, or the prostitute and drunken patron’s power struggle – are all going to be on display. A sobering note to end on, I know. (get it?)

Notes:

References and Suggested Reading:

Glorie, F., ed. Variae Collectiones Aenigmatum Merovingicae Aetatis. Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, vol. 133-133A. Turnhout: Brepols, 1968.

Leahy, Kevin. Anglo-Saxon Crafts. Stroud: Tempus, 2003, esp. pages 106-7.

Magennis, Hugh. “The Cup as Symbol and Metaphor in Old English Literature.” Speculum, vol. 60 (1985), pages 517-36.

Morris, Richard, ed. The Blickling Homilies. Early English Text Society o.s. (original series) 58, 63, 73. London: Oxford University Press, 1874-80.

Murphy, Patrick J. Unriddling the Exeter Riddles. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011, pages 204-6.

Salvador-Bello, Mercedes. “The Sexual Riddle Type in Aldhelm’s Enigmata, the Exeter Book, and Early Medieval Latin.” Philological Quarterly, vol. 90 (2012), pages 357-85, esp. 371-2.

Stephens, Win. “The Bright Cup: Early Medieval Vessel Glass.” In The Material Culture of Daily Living in the Anglo-Saxon World. Edited by Maren Clegg Hyer and Gale R. Owen-Crocker. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2011 (repr. 2013 by Liverpool University Press), pages 275-92.

Tags: anglo saxon exeter book riddles old english solutions riddle 63 bibliography latin

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Exeter Riddle 64

VICTORIASYMONS

Date: Thu 13 Jul 2017

Matching Commentaries: Commentary for Exeter Riddle 64

More runes, folks! If you can’t see the runes in the Old English riddle below, scroll down to the bottom of this post where you'll find a screenshot.

Original text:

Ic seah · ᚹ · ond · ᛁ ·     ofer wong faran,

beran · ᛒ · ᛖ ·     Bæm wæs on siþþe

hæbbendes hyht     · ᚻ · ond · ᚪ ·

swylce þryþa dæl     · ᚦ · ond · ᛖ ·

5     Gefeah · ᚠ · ond · ᚫ ·     fleah ofer · ᛠ

ᛋ · ond · ᛈ ·     sylfes þæs folces.

Translation:

I saw w and i travel over the plain,

carrying b . e . With both on that journey there was

the keeper’s joy: h and a,

also a share of the power: þ and e.

5     F and æ rejoiced, flew over the ea

s and p of the same people.
w and i = wicg (horse)

b and e = beorn (man)

h and a = hafoc (hawk)

þ and e = þegn (man)

f and æ = fælca (falcon)

ea and s and p = easpor? (water-track)

Click to show riddle solution?

man on horseback; falconry; ship; scribe; writing

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 62: Craig Williamson, ed., The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), page 105.

Screen shot for the runes:
Riddle 64 with runes

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Exeter Riddle 65

MEGANCAVELL

Date: Thu 10 Aug 2017

Matching 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.

Original text:

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.

Translation:

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.

Click to show riddle solution?

Onion, Leek, Chives

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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Commentary for Exeter Riddle 65

MEGANCAVELL

Date: Thu 17 Aug 2017

Matching Riddle: Exeter Riddle 65

Riddle 65’s commentary is once again by Judy Kendall, Reader in English and Creative Writing at Salford University. Take it away, Judy!
 
The generally accepted solution to this riddle is Onion, although Moritz Trautmann argued for Leek or Chives. We know that the early English knew their onions. One proof of this is the first Onion riddle in the Exeter Book, the rude lewd Riddle 25. Physical evidence of onion-growing is trickier to find, since onions are small and their tissues, once deteriorated, leave little trace. However, we do know that the Romans grew onions because of onion bulb-shaped holes left in Pompeii gardens and carbonized onions in Pompeii kitchens (there’s a picture of these in Meyer, page 412 – free to read online with a MYJSTOR account).
There is even an onion, white and ash-like, named the Pompeii onion:
Photo (by ayngelina) from Flickr (license CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
All this is relevant (to an extent) because we also know that the Romans took onions on journeys to the further reaches of their empire, including Britain, and doubtless grew them there.
Riddle 65 offers a much more polite take on this vegetable than Riddle 25. That said, the two riddles share marked similarities. Frederick Tupper noted how both refer to loss of head and confinement in a narrow place (page 124), and Patrick Murphy points out that both recall traditional riddles of torture in their use of rapid-fire enumerations of various kinds of suffering (pages 223-4). Such “series of tortures” lists surface elsewhere in the Exeter Book too, as in the heart-aching opening list of actions inflicted upon an animal – skinned, stretched and scraped – in order to produce the vellum of Riddle 26’s book.
Riddle 65 also evokes an onion in its use of artful alliteration. The riddle’s striking aural effects are spiky, piquant, biting, even “attractively staccato,” as Kevin Crossley-Holland has it (page 105). Such effects not only describe an onion’s taste and smell, but also replicate onion skins, circling in layers through and around the riddle. Echoing and interlocking, they repeat back to themselves – just like an onion does. This layering effect is also evident in the recurrence of selected words and phrasal structures, as in the unusual use of parallel antithetical clauses in the same half line (line 2a).
In short, if you know your onions, you soon realize Riddle 65 is much more of an onion than a leek or chive. Its features are oniony: distinctive “biting” taste and smell, layered rings of skin – a palimpsest of interconnecting elements, effects on digestion, bulbous bulbs and the opportunities that these afford for bunching in “fetters.”


Photo (by Xemenendura) of bunching onions from Wikimedia Commons (licence: CC BY-SA 4.0).

These all fit so much better with the riddle’s sounds, structure and allusions to head, body and bite, than the slimmer milder attributes of the bulbless leek that, for my money, there isn’t really a contest between the two. Apologies, leek…
The author’s composition in Edible Poetry
In the Old English, these clues are embedded in the complex repeating onion-like patterns that extend aurally across the lines. The modern English translation proffered here attempts to keep something of these aural and structural onion clues. Thus, the hard-sounding bite of “cw” of line one is reciprocated in modern English with “qu.”
The repeated use of “cw,” or “qu,” constitute acts of artful alliteration, a term Andy Orchard defines as the use of sound cleverly combined with meaning for overall effect. The “cw” or “qu” marks life – cwico (quick/life), and death – cwele (quelled/death). These two states are thus both linked and contrasted. This is most striking in the Old English where “cw” heads each half-line in line 1, and where the alliteration is picked up again in line 2 with the use of cwom, which constitutes a second reference to life. In the modern English line 2, “came” provides a much weaker echo of the “qu” sound, so “qu” is also inserted in the last word of the second half of that line, as part of “quarry,” another possible allusion to death. This helps sustain the effect of the original doubly and interlinearly alliterative “cw,” bleeding across from one line to the next.
Initially, in line 1, the riddle suggests that death follows life. The advent of death does not seem very remarkable to us, so it is odd that the poet chooses þeah or seþeah (nevertheless/but/yet) to introduce it. However, the parallel antithetical clauses of the first half of line 2 help to explain this emphasis on oddity. Line 2 opens with an allusion to life followed, presumably, by death: Ær ic wæs, but this is then immediately followed by a similarly structured reference to life (eft ic cwom). Life, followed by death, followed once again by life. Peculiar, since, for humans anyway, death tends to be terminal.
Craig Williamson notes that such an arrangement of clauses within the same half line is very unusual in Old English verse – “highly, perhaps deliberately, eccentric” (page 331). He sees it as an indication of a poet who has “radical ideas about breaking the rules of Old English metre” (page 332). Such a deliberate act of rebellion is asking us to pay close attention to these lines. Here, it suggests, is an embedded clue. The half line indicates regular renewal, a life-death-life-death-life-death cycle. Recurring death constitutes a departure from normality in human experience, but not so for onions.
Thus, these unusually-placed antithetical clauses point us definitively away from reading the subject as human towards a focus on the plant world, on onions perhaps. Onions metamorphose from bulb to fully-grown onion and then back again to bulb. These references to the paralleling and continual sequencing of life and death are reinforced by the positioning, sounds and structural phrasings in both line 1 and 2: line 1’s opening life (Cwico waes ic) matches line 2’s opening death (Ær ic wæs); the phrases are knit even more closely together by the use of alliterated “w”s and repeated ic’s; the similar sounding ic efne/eft ic of lines 1 and 2 also serve this purpose. Everything seems to circle and repeat.
In lines 3 and 4, the riddle continues to tease us with apparent illogicalities of sequence. The somewhat bizarre list of abuses and torture places experiences of being bitten and broken after what for a human would surely be the worst fate of all – decapitation. Double alliteration continues to be employed within each line and parallel phrasing and repeated sounds and words across them, again artfully reminding us of the onion’s cyclical life and circular skin. Most notably, in lines 3 and 4, the words mec on/min/mec on/mine link back to the mec in line 2, as well as pushing forwards to the me/mec, in lines 5 and 6, and culminating in the use of “m” as the alliterative link in the last lines – more repetitious circular effect. In addition, the riddle’s initial cross-alliterative pattern is reprised and hyped up in lines 4-5-6, with repeated references to the “biter bitten” motif, a commonplace in early English riddles, and, as many have observed, constituting a strong echo of the mordeo mordentes of Symphosius’s Latin onion riddle (Enigma 44).
Some of the repeated sounds, colour-coded – there are more!
Is the poet just showing off? Or is there something else to consider. Why the repetition of me? Does it suggest self-obsession? If so, it contrasts oddly with the apparent argument of the last lines, in which the violence of human consumers seems to be starkly compared to the reasonable restrain of the meek and gentle onion – a view that the fruitarians and raw foodies of today would find sympathetic perhaps. The onion only bites in self-defence, unlike the aggressive behaviour of its human attackers.
However, just as the skins of the onion are shed to reveal more onion skin, so this poem’s emphasis on “bite” digs deeper than might first appear. We seem to be reading about the bite of man, but the sounds and repetitions of the words in which this is articulated forcefully bring home the bite of the onion. It might not be the first to bite but this does not negate its ever-ready aggression which is communicated through the biting sound that runs throughout the riddle as well as through the repeated alliteration of “bite” at the riddle’s end. The onion may present itself as a meek mild victim but its spiky voice, and the repeated emphasis on me me me, suggest otherwise.
In this regard, it is pleasing to discover an Old English riddle keeping abreast of developments in modern science. In 2008, the New Scientist reported Annika Paukner and Stephen Suomi’s discovery that monkeys grow more solitary and aggressive after washing with onions (Kaplan)! The onion, as Riddle 65 declares in both sound and sense, is both assertive (me me) and aggressive: ready and ripe for a fight, whether full-on or more covertly, as in the sneakily indirect effect of the emphasis of the very last line. This appears to stress the many bites of the human consumer. However, since the previous line has just established that any human act of violence will engender an onion’s retaliation, it also sets up the onion with equally as many opportunities of biting.
Alternatively, just to put a further onion in the works, onions are also beneficial. Pliny the Elder catalogued, before succumbing to the volcanic eruption near Pompeii, the curative properties of onions in relation to vision, sleep, mouth sores, dog bites, toothaches, dysentery and lumbago (National Onion Association). Recent scientific research reveals that they have a proven efficacy in the case of asthma (Elmsley).
I could really splurge on onions now by noting how the spikey staccato effects created by alliteration, word order and phrasing give a good impression of difficulty in breathing, gradually evening out in later lines. But better not – wouldn’t want you to think I’ve completely lost my onions.

Notes:

References and Suggested Reading:

Crossley-Holland, Kevin, trans. The Exeter Book Riddles. London: Enitharmon, 2008.

Emsley, John. “Onions Run Rings around Chemists.” New Scientist (30 September 1989)

Kaplan, Matt. “Onion Washing Gets Monkeys in a Lather.” New Scientist (21 July 2008).

Meyer, Frederick G. “Carbonized Food Plants of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and the Villa at Torre Annunziata.” Economic Botany, vol. 34, issue 4 (1980), pages 401-37.

Murphy, Patrick J. Unriddling the Exeter Riddles. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011.

National Onion Association. “History of Onions” (2011).

Orchard, Andy. “Artful Alliteration in Anglo-Saxon Song and Story.” Anglia, vol. 113, issue 1 (1995), pages 429-63.

Salvador-Bello, Mercedes. Isidorean Perceptions of Order: The Exeter Book Riddles and Medieval Latin Enigmata. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2015.

Taylor, Archer. English Riddles from Oral Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951.

Tupper, Frederick Jr. The Riddles of the Exeter Book. Boston: Ginn, 1910.

Williamson, Craig. The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book. Chapel Hill: University of North Caroline Press, 1977.

Tags: anglo saxon exeter book riddles old english solutions riddle 65 judy kendall

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Exeter Riddle 66

MEGANCAVELL

Date: Mon 04 Sep 2017

Matching Commentaries: Commentary for Exeter Riddle 66

This translation is by Erin Sebo, lecturer in English at Flinders University in Australia. Erin is especially interested in wisdom literature, heroism and the history of emotions (so, all the good stuff!).

Original text:

Ic eom mare      þonne þes middangeard

læsse þonne hondwyrm,      leohtre þonne mona,

swiftre þonne sunne.      Sæs me sind ealle

flodas on fæðmum      ond þes foldan bearm,

grene wongas.      Grundum ic hrine,

helle underhnige,      heofonas oferstige,

wuldres eþel,      wide ræce

ofer engla eard,      eorþan gefylle,

ealne middangeard      ond merestreamas

side mid me sylfum.      Saga hwæt ic hatte.

Translation:

I am greater than this middle-earth,

less than a hand-worm, lighter than the moon,

swifter than the sun.  All the seas’ tides are

in my embraces and the earthen breast,

the green fields.  I touch the foundations,

I sink under hell, I soar over the heavens,

the home of glory; I reach wide

over the homeland of angels; I fill the earth abundantly,

the entire world and the streams of the oceans

with myself. Say what I am called.

Click to show riddle solution?

Creation, God

Notes:

This riddle appears on folios 125r-125v 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), pages 230-1.

Note that this edition numbers the text Riddle 64: Craig Williamson, ed., The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), pages 105-6.

Tags: anglo saxon exeter book riddles old english solutions riddle 66

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Commentary for Exeter Riddle 66

MEGANCAVELL

Date: Tue 26 Sep 2017

Matching Riddle: Exeter Riddle 66

This commentary post is once again by Erin Sebo at Flinders University in Australia. Take it away, Erin!
 
Riddle 66 is the second of the three “Creation Riddles” in the Exeter Book (Riddles 40, 66 and 94). Although it’s common to find several riddles with the same answer – or which seem to have the same answer – the creation riddles are unusual because they are all versions of the same riddle, just “edited” a bit. (Or in the case of Riddle 94, a lot.)
All riddles have a trick at their heart: a paradox, an ambiguity, a misdirection; the thing that makes the riddle hard to solve. It’s the thing that makes a riddle a riddle.
Riddles 40, 66, and 94 and their parent, Aldhelm’s epic Latin De Creatura (the last riddle in his riddle sequence), all have the same trick and the same solution. They’re same riddle, even though the words are different.
If the number of surviving versions is anything to go on (and maybe it’s not), it was the most popular riddle in early England. Or, if not the most popular, perhaps the most important? The best known? Whatever it was, the complier(s) of the Exeter Book thought it was worth the vellum to write out different versions of it.
But it’s not how Riddles 40, 66, and 94 are the same that’s the most interesting bit; what’s really interesting is how they’re different. Each version of this riddle gives us a slightly different insight into how the world was imagined. In the case of Riddle 66, it gives us an insight into how ordinary people, or at least some ordinary people, imagined the world. That’s rare in early medieval texts.
De Creatura was written by a theologian (Aldhelm), and Riddle 40 was translated by someone who was at least educated enough to read Latin, but from the way Riddle 66 has been adapted, made shorter, more focused, more memorable, it may well have spent time in the oral tradition, being told and retold. For example, the litany of oppositions, often illustrated by obscure or exotic animals or materials and underpinned by allusions to scripture, of Riddle 40, is replaced by simple, broad elemental images. On the other hand, the memorable and unusual word hondwyrm is preserved. (Often something that’s characteristic will stick in people’s minds so these elements tend to survive.) Otherwise, very few of the same details survive, just the overall idea, which is typical of the way oral texts change. So while most of the Exeter Riddles are composed and meant to be read this one was probably told – and given the lack of details which reveal specialist knowledge, not to mention the highly unorthodox (potentially heretical) view of the world, it may well have been told by ordinary people.
So, how did the ordinary medieval person of this riddle imagine the world? The most striking thing is that the riddle doesn’t mention God. Riddle 40 imagines Creation more or less like this:


13^th-century Psalter World Map from a manuscript called British Library Add. MS 28681, via Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain).

God on the outside, who healdeð ond wealdeð (holds and controls) (Riddle 40, line 5a), is keeping an eye on things. But in Riddle 66, Creation is imagined not as a collection of all the things that make up the physical and/or metaphysical worlds, but rather as a force, racing around the world, diving under the seas. Unlike Riddle 40 which has a series of dichotomies, with a positive and a negative side, Creation in Riddle 66 is made up of excellent qualities only: it’s fast and bright and can reach the angels. It’s expansive. Although creation says it’s laesse, most of the riddle is about how it fills the oceans and extends through the fields. By the same token, it dives under hell but there’s no mention of devils, only of soaring as high as angels. It’s an optimistic force. And it’s not clear what its relationship to God is because this is never quite articulated. It is described more like an irresistible force, racing freely around the space it inhabits, than an expression of God. It does not describe itself as enacting God’s plan or acting on his orders. And the fact it only reaches angels, not God himself seems to suggest that they are not connected.
It’s an unusual idea of the world.
And it’s as surprising in its details as it is in its overall conception and I want to end with one of its strangest, tiniest details; tiny hondwyrm. It seems to be a parasitic insect but we’re not sure what kind exactly. And it’s also the only animal mentioned. There are no birds or fish or mammals – including humans. So, I’ll finish the commentary on this riddle with a question – why is this tiny insect more important than all other creatures?

Notes:

References and Suggested Reading:

Michelet, Fabienne. Creation, Migration and Conquest: Imaginary Geography and Sense of Space in Old English Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Neville, Jennifer. Representations of the Natural World in Old English Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Sebo, Erin. In Enigmate: The History of a Riddle from 400-1500. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2017. (coming out in October!)

Wehlau, Ruth. The Riddle of Creation: Metaphor Structures in Old English Poetry. New York: Peter Lang, 1997.

Tags: exeter book riddles old english solutions riddle 66 erin sebo

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Exeter Riddle 67

MEGANCAVELL

Date: Mon 02 Oct 2017

Matching Commentaries: Commentary for Exeter Riddle 67

Riddle 67’s translation is by Brett Roscoe of The King’s University, Alberta. Thanks for taking on such a tough riddle, Brett!

Original text:

Ic on þinge gefrægn      þeodcyninges

wrætlice wiht,      wordgaldra [. . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .] snytt[. . . . .] hio symle deð

fira gehw[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

5     . . . .] wisdome.      Wundor me þæt [. . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .] nænne muð hafað.

fet ne [. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . .]      welan oft sacað,

cwiþeð cy[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .] wearð

10     leoda lareow.      Forþon nu longe m[.]g

[. . . . . . . . . ] ealdre      ece lifgan

missenlice,      þenden menn bugað

eorþan sceatas.      Ic þæt oft geseah

golde gegierwed,      þær guman druncon,

15     since ond seolfre.      Secge se þe cunne,

wisfæstra hwylc,      hwæt seo wiht sy.

Translation:

I have heard of a wondrous creature

in the king’s council,(1) magical words [. . .

[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .] it always does

of men[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

5     . . . . . . .] wisdom. A wonder to me that [. . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .] has no mouth.

No feet [ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . .] often contend for wealth,

says [. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .] “(I) have become

10     a teacher of peoples. Therefore now a long time

[. . . . . . . . .]life eternally live,

in various places, while people inhabit

the expanses of the earth.” I have often seen it,

adorned with gold, treasure and silver,

15     where men drank. Let him who knows,

each one who is wise, say what that creature is.

Click to show riddle solution?

Bible, Religious Book

Notes:

This riddle appears on folio 125v 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 231.

Note that this edition numbers the text Riddle 65: Craig Williamson, ed., The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), page 106.

Translation Note:

(1) “in the king’s council” can describe either the hearing or the wondrous creature.

Tags: anglo saxon exeter book riddles old english solutions riddle 67

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Commentary for Exeter Riddle 67

MEGANCAVELL

Date: Mon 09 Oct 2017

Matching Riddle: Exeter Riddle 67

Riddle 67's commentary is once again by Brett Roscoe of The King’s University, Alberta. Go, Brett, go!


Let me start by assuring you that this is not a connect-the-dot puzzle, though it looks like one. The rows of periods show where we cannot read the riddle because the manuscript has been damaged. In the Middle Ages, manuscripts weren’t used just used for writing. The manuscript in which most of the Old English riddles are found, the Exeter Book, was used as a coaster, a chopping-board, and later even as kindling for fire! (though to be fair, I should say that this last use was accidental). When you add to that dirt, dust and mould, and natural wear and tear over time, it actually isn’t surprising that the manuscript is damaged. It’s more surprising that it survived, and that we’re fortunate enough to read it today.
That said, though, we’re still faced with the problem of reading this riddle. It may not be a connect-the-dot, but what if it were a fill-in-the-blank exercise? Here is the poem after filling in some of the blanks with suggestions made by various scholars (these are summarized in Krapp and Dobbie, pages 368-9):
Ic on þinge gefrægn    þeodcyninges

wrætlice wiht,    wordgaldra [sum

secgan mid] snytt[ro,    swa] hio symle deð

fira gehw[am. . . . . . . . . . . . . .]

. . . .] wisdome.    Wundor me þæt [þuhte

þæt hio mihte swa]    nænne muð hafað.

fet ne [folme. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . .]    welan oft sacað,

cwiþeð cy[mlice . . . . . . . . .] wearð

leoda lareow.    Forþon nu longe m[æ]g

[awa to] ealdre    ece lifgan

missenlice,    þenden men bugað

eorþan sceatas.    Ic þæt oft geseah

golde gegierwed,    þær guman druncon,

since ond seolfre.    Secge se þe cunne,

wisfæstra hwylc,    hwæt seo wiht sy.
O.k., so it’s still not perfect, but we could at least say it’s a bit better. And it can help us flesh out our translation:
I have heard of a wondrous creature

in the king’s council, speaking magical words

with wisdom, as it always does

men[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . .] wisdom. It seemed a wonder to me that

it could speak as it has no mouth.

No feet or hands[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . .] often contend for wealth,

says fittingly [. . .] “(I) have become

a teacher of peoples. Therefore now for a long time,

always unto life, I can eternally live,

in various places, while people inhabit

the expanses of the earth.” I have often seen it,

adorned with gold, treasure and silver,

where men drank. Let him who knows,

each one who is wise, say what that creature is.
Now the riddle is – though still unclear – legible enough to point to a solution. Most agree that its solution is “Bible,” or some sort of gilded religious book. Lines 5-6 express amazement that this speaker, whoever or whatever it is, is mouth-less. And a mouth-less speaker in Latin and Old English riddles often suggests a kind of writing or writing utensil, since a written text conveys its message to the eyes of the reader without making a sound (see Riddle 60, Riddle 95, and Eusebius’ Latin Enigma 7, De Littera and 33, De Membrano). Besides having no mouth, this strange speaker also has fet ne (no feet), and possibly no hands (if we accept the reconstruction of folme), and it speaks wordgaldra (magical words). Magical words suggest that the book has power outside of its covers; it has authority in the “real” world. It is, after all, a leoda lareow (teacher of peoples). What kind of book would have this kind of authority and power? The Bible, with its message of salvation and world transformation, would seem to fit the bill.
The strongest hint at the religious nature of this book is the fact that it is gilded with gold and silver (lines 13b-15a). Gold and silver were often used to decorate Bible manuscripts. We’ve already seen this kind of decoration in Riddle 26, but just to refresh our memories, here is an example from the Lindisfarne Gospels showing the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew:
Photo from Wikipedia Commons (public domain)
This kind of attention was usually reserved for religious texts such as Bibles, psalters, lectionaries, and books of hours. The elaborate decorations reflected the value placed on the content of the manuscript.
So if the answer is a Bible, why are we told that it is often seen þær guman druncon (“where men drank,” line 14b)? If you’re like me, you probably think of reading as a quiet, solitary activity. When I read I make myself a cup of tea, go to a quiet room, and maybe turn on some mellow music. I don’t invite friends over for a party and then pull out a book. Though we may not often think of reading as a public event, it is an activity that provides an opportunity for social bonding. Have you ever been to a public poetry or book reading? Or have you ever read a children’s book to your son or daughter at bedtime? Have you heard the Bible read out loud during a Sunday church service? If so, you’ll have a sense of what this riddle is talking about. In fact, in medieval monasteries it was a common practice to listen to the Bible read out loud during meals. We might say, then, that Riddle 67 uses the kingly hall to represent the monastery. I’m not sure who this comparison would flatter more, the monks or the warriors, but it is not an uncommon comparison in the Exeter Book riddles.
If you’re interested in reading more about early medieval Bibles, you might want to compare this riddle to Riddles 26, 59, and perhaps 95.

Notes:

References and Suggested Reading:

Clemens, Raymond, and Timothy Graham. Introduction to Manuscript Studies. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007.

Krapp, George Philip, and Elliott van Kirk Dobbie, eds. The Exeter Book. New York: Columbia University Press, 1936.

Williamson, Craig, ed. The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977.

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