RIDDLE POSTS BY TAG: 'RIDDLE 85'

Exeter Riddle 85

MEGANCAVELL

Date: Thu 20 Jun 2019
Matching Commentaries: Commentary for Exeter Riddle 85
Original text:

Nis min sele swige,         ne ic sylfa hlud
ymb * * *(1) unc dryhten scop
siþ ætsomne.         Ic eom swiftre þonne he,
þragum strengra,         he þreohtigra.
Hwilum ic me reste;         he sceal yrnan forð.
Ic him in wunige         a þenden ic lifge;
gif wit unc gedælað,         me bið deað witod.

Translation:

My house is not silent, nor am I loud myself
about … the lord created for us two
a journey together. I am swifter than he,
stronger at times, he the more enduring.
Sometimes I rest myself; he must run forth.
I always dwell within him for as long as I live;
if we two are divided, death is certain for me.

Click to show riddle solution?
Fish and River, Body and Soul


Notes:

This riddle appears on folio 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), page 238.

Note that this edition numbers the text Riddle 81: Craig Williamson, ed., The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), page 115.

Textual Note:

(1) There’s a blank space in the manuscript here with room for about seven letters



Tags: anglo saxon  exeter book  riddles  old english  solutions  riddle 85 

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Commentary for Exeter Riddle 85
Exeter Riddle 23
Exeter Riddle 63

Exeter Riddle 85 in Spanish / en Español

MEGANCAVELL

Date: Tue 20 Jul 2021

Dr. José Antonio Alonso Navarro holds a PhD in English Philology from the Coruña University (Spain) and a BA in English Philology from the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain). Currently, Alonso Navarro is a Full Professor of History of the English Language at the National University of Asuncion (Paraguay). His main interest revolves around the translation of Middle English texts into Spanish. Needless to say, he is also very enthusiastic about Old English riddles.



Original text:

Nis min sele swige,         ne ic sylfa hlud
ymb * * * unc dryhten scop
siþ ætsomne.         Ic eom swiftre þonne he,
þragum strengra,         he þreohtigra.
Hwilum ic me reste;         he sceal yrnan forð.
Ic him in wunige         a þenden ic lifge;
gif wit unc gedælað,         me bið deað witod.

Translation:

Mi casa no es silenciosa, ni yo mismo soy ruidoso cerca de (…) Dios creó para nosotros dos una empresa (un viaje) en conjunto. Yo soy más veloz que él, algunas veces más fuerte, él, más imperecedero. En ocasiones, yo descanso (de mi labor); él, sin embargo, debe seguir moviéndose. Yo siempre habito en él mientras estoy vivo; si se nos separa, entonces la muerte vendrá a mí con toda certeza.

Click to show riddle solution?
El pez y el río, El cuerpo y el alma


Tags: anglo saxon  exeter book  riddles  old english  riddle 85  José Antonio Alonso Navarro 

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Commentary for Exeter Riddle 85
Exeter Riddle 85

Exeter Riddle 85 in Indonesian / Di dalam Bahasa Indonesia

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.

Eggi Triyadi is a native Indonesian who currently resides in the United States of America. He enjoys a lot of art activities, including sculpting, singing, and painting. He is also a big fan of musical theatre. One of his favourite Broadway shows is Hamilton.

Denis Ferhatovic lahir di kota yang telah tiada, di negari yang telah tiada. Beliau adalah penulis dari Barang-barang pinjaman dan seni puisi : Spolia di persajakan bahasa Inggris kuno (2019). Beliau suka membaca, menganalisa, dan menulis tentang perbahasaan, perjalanan, penerjemahan, budaya LGBTQ+, seni, kucing, makanan dan banyak hal lainnya.

Eggi Triyadi adalah orang Indonesia yang sekarang berdomisili di Amerika Serikat. Beliau menikmati banyak aktivitas seni, termasuk seni memahat, menyanyi dan melukis. Beliau juga adalah penggemar drama musikal. Satu di antara pertunjukkan Broadway yang beliau sukai adalah Hamilton.



Original text:

Nis min sele swige,         ne ic sylfa hlud
ymb * * *(1) unc dryhten scop
siþ ætsomne.         Ic eom swiftre þonne he,
þragum strengra,         he þreohtigra.
Hwilum ic me reste;         he sceal yrnan forð.
Ic him in wunige         a þenden ic lifge;
gif wit unc gedælað,         me bið deað witod.

Translation:

Bukan balaiku yang terdiam, bukan juga diriku yang bising.
Tuhan menciptakan perjalanan kami berdua
Bersama-sama. Diriku lebih cepat dari dirinya.
Ada kalanya diriku lebih kuat, dirinya lebih kekal.
Kadang-kadang ketika diriku beristirahat, dirinya harus tetap mengalir.
Diriku berdiam di dalamnya seumur hidup.
Jika kami berdua terpisah, itu akhir hidupku. 

Click to show riddle solution?
ikan dan sungai


Notes:

(1) Ada ruang kosong di dalam naskah ini yang dapat diisi dengan tujuh huruf / There is a blank space in the manuscript here with room for about seven letters.



Tags: exeter book  old english  riddle 85  denis ferhatovic  Eggi Triyadi 

Commentary for Exeter Riddle 85

MEGANCAVELL

Date: Thu 18 Jul 2019
Matching Riddle: Exeter Riddle 85

Riddle 85 tells a story that we all know well: fish can’t survive out of water. I think there may even be a saying about that…

Carp bream swimming

Here is a nice Carp Bream via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

This riddle topic is found around the world and in many different historical contexts, so we can be fairly certain of its solution (Bitterli, page 14). The first recorded instance seems to be that of the 4th/5th-century North African riddler Symphosius. His Latin Enigma 12, Flumen et Piscis (River and Fish) reads:

est domus in terris clara quae voce resultat.
ipsa domus resonat, tacitus sed non sonat hospes.
ambo tamen currunt hospes simul et domus una. (Leary, page 41)

(There is a house on earth that rebounds with a clear voice.
The house itself resounds, but its silent host does not make a sound.
Nevertheless, both the host and the house travel together at the same time.)

Pretty similar to Riddle 85, right? We have a noisy house and a silent inhabitant traveling together. Here the inhabitant is a hospes (host…or guest for that matter), which is a little different from our Old English riddle, but it’s still much of a muchness.

 

There’s another – much shorter this time – Latin version that makes use of the same motif in Alcuin of York’s fabulously titled Disputatio regalis et nobilissimi iuvenis Pippini cum Albino scholastico (Debate between the regal and noble youth Pippin and Alcuin the scholar). Alcuin wrote this prose debate with its many puzzles and riddles for Pippin, the son of Charlemagne, likely when he was working at the Carolingian court from the years 781-794 (Bitterli, page 13). I *really* like this version because the Pippin of the text is a cheeky little thing:

A. Vidi hospitem currentem cum domo sua, et ille tacebat et domus sonabat.
B. Para mihi rete, et pandam tibi. (Alcuin, page 142, number 98)

(Alcuin: I saw a host travelling with his house; he was silent, and his house resounded.
Pippin: Get a net for me, and I will lay it out for you.)

Pippin is saying that he knows full well where to look for the solution to this riddle. And his command to get him a net hints at the death of the fish, which he jokes about removing from its watery habitat.

When it comes to Riddle 85, I like to think that this watery habitat is evident in the repeated sounds that snake their way through the poem. There are a heck of a lot of ‘s’ and ‘sh’ and ‘ch’ sounds (in Old English ‘sc’ is pronounced ‘sh’ and ‘c’ is often ‘ch’), echoing the noisy, rushing river described in the opening lines. But then we reach the final line’s hard ‘d’s, which slow the rushing water to a standstill, linking gedælað (are divided) and deað (death) in the process. The sonic play of this poem is DEEP, guys.

And the fish’s death is an innovation of the Old English poet – no OE poem is complete without a good helping of angst! Hence, death is the focus of the final lines. The fish – now the speaker rather than mere subject of the riddle – muses: Ic him in wunige a þenden ic lifge; / gif wit unc gedælað, me bið deað witod (I always dwell within him for as long as I live; if we two are divided, death is certain for me). Just as the water back in Riddle 77 protected the oyster from voracious humans, here the river is life-sustaining for the fish. But it’s more than that: this animal and its habitat share a symbiotic existence, a common siþ (journey). They’re linked firmly together by the fabulous dual pronouns unc and wit, pronouns whose meaning – “the two of us” – suggests an especially close bond. And the animal/habitat are also linked in that the riddle, as Marie Nelson puts it, “has a strangely compound single subject. There is a solution, but it is fish and river, two identities so dependent that they seem one” (page 611). Two become one.

The journey of the fish and river is placed firmly within a Christian framework, as the fish-speaker (good compound, that!) proclaims that dryhten (the lord) created both the animal and its home. This and the poem’s focus on unity vs separation and life vs death has led to the suggestion of an alternate solution: Soul and Body (Orchard, page 294; Murphy, page 20). Poems about the soul and body are pretty common in Old English, and the idea that one lives within the other – often rather unwillingly! – comes up time and time again. See, for example, Soul and Body II (full translation here), which lives in the same manuscript as Riddle 85:

Eardode ic þe in innan.      No ic þe of meahte,
flæsce bifongen,      ond me firenlustas
þine geþrungon. (lines 30-2a)

(I lived within you. Nor was I able get out of you,
surrounded by flesh, and your sinful pleasures
oppressed me.)

Yeah, I can see how this is similar to Riddle 85, apart from the fact that the body does the soul wrong (earthly temptations and all that), while the river is essential to the fish. So it’s more likely, as Patrick Murphy argues, that a soul-and-body metaphor is being used to give this riddle about a fish and river a little extra something something…my words, not his (page 20).

With that in mind and with the prospect of my own river-side holiday looming large, I’m going to leave you to ponder this riddle on your own now.

Here, have some nice, ambient background sounds as you go:

Notes:

References and Suggested Reading

Alcuin. “Disputatio regalis et nobilissimi juvenis Pippini cum Albino scholastico.” In Altercatio Hadriani Augusti et Epicteti Philosophi. Edited by Lloyd William Daly and Walther Suchier. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1939, pages 134-46.

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, esp. pages 14-18.

Leary, T. J., ed. Symphosius: The Aenigmata: An Introduction, Text and Commentary. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.

Murphy, Patrick. Unriddling the Exeter Riddles. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011, esp. pages 19-20.

Nelson, Marie. “The Paradox of Silent Speech in the Exeter Book Riddles.” Neophilologus, volume 62, issue 4 (1978), pages 609-15.

Orchard, Andy. “Enigma Variations: The Anglo-Saxon Riddle-tradition.” In Latin Learning and English Lore: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Literature for Michael Lapidge. Edited by Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe and Andy Orchard (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), pages 284-304.



Tags: anglo saxon  exeter book  riddles  old english  solutions  riddle 85  latin 

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