Exeter Riddle 84
MEGANCAVELL
Date: Thu 31 May 2018Matching Commentaries: Commentary for Exeter Riddle 84
Riddle 84 is translated by Beth Whalley, a PhD candidate at King’s College London. She works on (SOLUTION SPOILER ALERT!) water and waterways in early medieval culture and the contemporary arts.
Note that this riddle is another of the heavily damaged poems in the Exeter Book (so there are going to be A LOT of the ellipses below):
An wiht is on eorþan wundrum acenned,
hreoh ond reþe, hafað ryne strongne,
grimme grymetað ond be grunde fareð.
Modor is monigra mærra wihta.
5 Fæger ferende fundað æfre;
neol is nearograp. Nænig oþrum mæg
wlite ond wisan wordum gecyþan,
hu mislic biþ mægen þara cynna,
fyrn forðgesceaft; fæder ealle bewat
10 or ond ende, swylce an sunu,
mære meotudes bearn, þurh [……….]ed,
ond þæt hyhste mæge[…..]es gæ[….
………………] dyre cræft [.
………………………
15 .]onne hy aweorp[…………………….
..]þe ænig þara [……………………
……]fter ne mæg […………………
……..] oþer cynn eorþan […….
…………..] þon ær wæs
20 wlitig ond wynsum, [………..]
Biþ sio moddor mægene eacen,
wundrum bewreþed, wistum gehladen,
hordum gehroden, hæleþum dyre.
Mægen bið gemiclad, meaht gesweotlad,
25 wlite biþ geweorþad wuldornyttingum,
wynsum wuldorgimm wloncum getenge,
clængeorn bið ond cystig, cræfte eacen;
hio biþ eadgum leof, earmum getæse,
freolic, sellic; fromast ond swiþost,
30 gifrost ond grædgost grundbedd trideþ,
þæs þe under lyfte aloden wurde
ond ælda bearn eagum sawe,
swa þæt wuldor wifeð, worldbearna mægen,
þeah þe ferþum gleaw * * *(1)
35 mon mode snottor mengo wundra.
Hrusan bið heardra, hæleþum frodra,
geofum bið gearora, gimmum deorra;
worulde wlitigað, wæstmum tydreð,
firene dwæsceð,
40 oft utan beweorpeð anre þecene,
wundrum gewlitegad, geond werþeode,
þæt wafiað weras ofer eorþan,
þæt magon micle [………..]sceafte.
Biþ stanum bestreþed, stormum [……….
45 …………]len [………]timbred weall,
þrym[………………………..]ed,
hrusan hrineð, h[……………
………………]etenge,
oft searwum biþ [……………
50 ……………] deaðe ne feleð,
þeah þe […………………….
……]du hreren, hrif wundigen,
[……………………]risse.
Hordword onhlid, hæleþum ge[….
55 ……..]wreoh, wordum geopena,
hu mislic sy mægen þara cy[…]
On earth there is a creature born from wonders,
turbulent and fierce, she has a strong course.
She roars cruelly and proceeds across the depths.
She is mother to many great creatures,
5 the fair one travelling, she always hastens;
deep down is her tight grasp. No one may
with wise words make known her countenance
or the diversity of her kin,
the ancient creation. The father watches over all,
10 beginning and end, as the son,
glorious child of God through …
and that highest …
… secret skill …
…
15 … they cast away …
… any of them …
… may not after …
… other kindred … earth …
… which earlier was
20 beautiful and joyous, …
This mother is pregnant with virtue,
buoyed with wonders, laden with food,
bedecked with treasures, beloved by heroes.
Her strength is magnified, her might is revealed,
25 her form made worthy by her glorious uses.
This joyous glory-gem hastens to the bold.
She is eager for purity, bountiful, skill-swollen;
she is dear to the prosperous, helpful to the poor,
noble, extraordinary; boldest and strongest,
30 most covetous and greediest, she tramples on the foundation
of everything grown under the heavens
that men of old have seen.
So that she weaves glory, the power of earth’s children
as she is wise of mind * * *
35 a man more prudent of mind, a multitude of wonders.
She is harder than earth, older than heroes,
is more giving than gifts, more beloved than jewels;
she beautifies the world, produces plants,
extinguishes sin,
40 often from outside she casts a roof,
wondrously beautiful, throughout the nations,
that amazes men over the earth,
they are able greatly …
It is heaped up with stones, with storms
45 … timbered wall,
glory …
touches the earth, …
… near,
often is skillfully …
50 … nor feels death,
although …
… shaken, belly wounded
…
Un-close the word-hoard, for heroes …
55 …cover, open with words,
how diverse is power of those …
Notes:
This riddle appears on folios 127v-128v 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 236-8.
Note that this edition numbers the text Riddle 80: Craig Williamson, ed., The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), pages 113-15.
Textual Note:
(1) Although there’s no problem with the manuscript at this point, the sense suggests that something is missing from the text here.
Tags: anglo saxon exeter book riddles old english solutions riddle 84
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Commentary for Exeter Riddle 84
MEGANCAVELL
Date: Thu 20 Jun 2019Matching Riddle: Exeter Riddle 84
Riddle 84’s commentary is by Beth Whalley, a PhD candidate at King’s College London. She works on water and waterways in early medieval culture and the contemporary arts, so she has a lot of fabulous insights into this poem! Take it away, Beth:
Well, what d’ya know? Our old friend the hot poker rears its head again in this riddle, comprehensively mangling a good one-third of our text. Solving this one should be a doddle, then…
Actually, we’re helped by the fact that Riddle 84 is unapologetically lengthy in riddling terms. At 56 lines it’s the third longest, storming in behind Riddle 3 and Riddle 40 (pun intended). So, although lots of it has been damaged, lots of it still survives. And from what’s left, it’s pretty clear what the solution is. The riddling subject births monigra mærra wihta (many great creatures). It is always on the move. It carries wistum gehladen (food-laden) ships from place to place, it wæstmum tydreð (produces plants) and it erases finere (sin). It is grædgost (greedy) but is also geofum (giving). This riddle is a protracted celebration of powerful, contradictory, dangerous, complex, life-giving, extraordinary water in all its forms.
One of the main reasons that editors of the riddles are in uncharacteristic agreement about this one is because the text is very conventional, in many ways, sharing a close relationship with other classical and medieval poetry and prose about water. Franz Dietrich notices how Riddle 84 borrows from Aldhelm’s seventh-century Latin riddles (those are the ones that were helpfully written down with their solutions) (page 484). Aldhelm’s Enigma 29, Aqua (water), says: Nam volucres caeli nantesque per aequora pisces / Olim sumpserunt ex me primordia vitae (page 109) (“The birds of the sky and the fish swimming in the sea once drew from me the beginnings of their life”: Lapidge and Rosier, pages 75-6, lines 4-5). In Enigma 73, Fons (fountain), we read: Quis numerus capiat vel quis laterculus aequet, / Vita viventum generem quot milia partu? (page 130) (“what number could embrace or what calculation encompass the many thousands of living creatures which I engender through birth?”: Lapidge and Rosier, page 86, lines 4-5). Compare that with Exeter Book Riddle 84’s Modor is monigra mærra wihta (she is mother to many great creatures). Sounds quite familiar, right?
Meanwhile, Frederick Tupper points out that Riddle 84’s account of water is similar to that of the Roman author Pliny the Elder in his 1st-century Natural History (page 222). Just as our riddler goes into exhaustive detail about water’s many different forms and powers, so too does Pliny. He describes waters which can cure insanity and lovesickness, cause drunkenness, improve your singing voice, change hair and skin colour, induce laughter and weeping, and turn things to stone (see Book XXXI, Chapters 1-37). Handy stuff!
However, it’s safe to say that Riddle 84 won’t be winning any popularity contests any time soon. Whether it’s because it’s a bit spun-out or because it pilfers ideas from other texts, the editors and translators of Riddle 84 generally don’t hold it in very high esteem. A. J. Wyatt, who edited the riddles in 1912, wrote that Riddle 84 “holds out a certain promise of beauty which is hardly fulfilled” (page 118). In the introduction to his own 1979 translation, Kevin Crossley-Holland says that the final lines are “fresh,” but the riddle is overall “repetitive” and “wooden” (page 111). Ouch.
Ok, maybe they have a point, especially because there is some fierce competition where water-riddles are concerned. In the face of Riddle 33 (where water is depicted as a totally badass iceberg-woman-warrior) and Riddle 74 (in which the speaker is a watery, fishy, siren-like shapeshifter), poor old Riddle 84 doesn’t really stand a chance.
I do feel compelled to jump to Riddle 84’s defence a bit, though, because it does have some cracking moments, if you ask me.
I especially love, for example, how water is associated with skill (cræft or searwum) not once, not twice, but THREE times in this riddle. How great is the imagery of mægene eacen (skill-swollen) water in line 21? You might have noticed that many of the Exeter Book’s riddles are preoccupied with the idea of skilled human craft as a form of violence against non-human things (run a search on “violence” in the search bar on the right and you’ll see what I mean). Here, however, it is water which is imagined as being the talented crafter; in line 34, it is said that she wuldor wifeð (weaves glory), a lovely image of material making which you should all go and read about in Megan Cavell’s book (page 275).
The riddler himself, meanwhile, and by extension all humans, are framed as somewhat lacking in the skills department. This becomes clear near the beginning of Riddle 84, where we read:
… nænig oþrum mæg
wlite ond wisan wordum gecyþan,
hu mislic biþ mægen þara cynna
(… no one may
with wise words make known her countenance
or the diversity of her kin)
The point is that water’s powers are beyond humankind’s descriptive capabilities, evading capture even by the verbal skills of the word-weaving riddler. We know (and medieval society knew too) that water is a uniquely strange substance, but according to the riddle it is only God, the fæder (father) who ealle bewat (watches over all), who has the power to fix its extraordinariness in words. Brian McFadden has pointed out that the word wundor (wonder) occurs a whopping four times in this riddle (page 337). It’s as though the riddler is reaching for, but can’t quite find, the right words to do justice to water in all its rich diversity.
So yes, I suppose what I’m saying is that Riddle 84 is kinda long, repetitive and a bit predictable at times on purpose, repeating, reiterating and re-tracing its words in order to try and come to terms with exactly what water is. The riddle makes the point that sometimes – and even though we literary folks love them – words aren’t quite enough.
And I haven’t yet even touched on the interesting stuff that this riddle does with gender. I’m sure you’ve noticed that water – like in Riddles 33, 41 and 74 – is explicitly made a woman (and a mother) here. The relationship between women, water, motherhood and the monstrous is an old, complex and sticky one which I don’t have the room to do justice to here – I’ve suggested some further reading below, instead.
I’m going to leave you with a video of people surfing on the Severn bore, of all things. I live in the South-West of England, and whenever I read Riddle 84’s opening lines it always makes me think of our strange local annual phenomenon. Several British rivers were given the names of goddesses, and the Severn is perhaps the most famous one of all, named for the British princess turned river-goddess Sabrina/Hafren who was drowned in the river by the order of her step-mother (if Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century account is to be believed). Witnessing the bore make its way down the river channel, the idea of water as a powerful divine agent really starts to make sense – don’t you think?
References and Suggested Reading
Aldhelm [in Latin]. Aldhelmi Opera. Edited by Rudolf Ehwald. For the series Monumenta Germaniae Historica Scriptores, Auctores Antiquissimi, vol. 15. Berlin, 1919. Online here.
Cavell, Megan. Weaving Words and Binding Bodies: The Poetics of Human Experience in Old English Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016.
Crossley-Holland, Kevin, trans. The Exeter Book Riddles. London: Enitharmon, 2008.
Dale, Corinne. “(Re)viewing the Warrior Woman: Reading the Old English “Iceberg” Riddle from an Ecofeminist Perspective.” Neophilologus, vol. 103, issue 3 (2019), pages 435-49, online here.
Dietrich, Franz Eduard. ”Die Räthsel des Exeterbuchs: Würdigung, Lösung und Herstellung.“ Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum, vol. 11 (1859), pages 448-90.
Lapidge, Michael, and James L. Rosier, trans. Aldhelm: The Poetic Works. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985.
Lees, Clare A., and Gillian R. Overing. “Women and Water: Icelandic Tales and Anglo-Saxon Moorings.” GeoHumanities, vol. 4 (2018), pages 1-15.
McFadden, Brian. “Raiding, Reform and Reaction: Wondrous Creatures in the Exeter Book Riddles.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 50, issue 4 (2008), pages 329-51.
Mize, Britt. “The Representation of the Mind as an Enclosure in Old English Poetry.” Anglo-Saxon England, vol. 35 (2006), pages 57-90.
Pliny the Elder. Natural History. Trans. by John Bostock for Perseus Digital Library (ed. Gregory R. Crane), online here.
Tupper, Frederick, ed. The Riddles of the Exeter Book. Boston: Ginn and Company, 1910.
Wyatt, A. J., ed. Old English Riddles. Boston: D. C. Heath, 1912.
The image at the top of the post is “Waterdrops” by Sander van der Wel via Wikimedia Commons, license: CC BY-SA 2.0
Tags: anglo saxon exeter book riddles old english solutions riddle 84 beth whalley
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