2 - Lost Craft: Tracing Ships in the Early Medieval Riddling Tradition

Summary

Historical records of conquest, migration and contact in the North Atlantic archipelago abound with sea-crossings: from Bede's account of Augustine's arrival in Kent in the sixth century, to the Norse landings from the eighth to the eleventh centuries documented in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Ships were, without doubt, familiar sights in the sea- and riverscapes of early medieval Europe. Yet the sea-going vessels responsible for these world-making journeys are relatively elusive in the material record. Constructed from organic matter, ships from this period were often left to disintegrate underwater, by accident or as a form of ritual deposition, or were deliberately broken up to be recycled. The archaeological record thus offers a fragmented picture of a complex maritime industry; in England, the high-status East Anglian ship-burials at Sutton Hoo and smaller burials at Snape hint at the spiritual and economic significance of ships and seafaring for elite communities, but these survivals can only represent a fraction of the wrought vessels which once criss-crossed the seas, estuaries and rivers of the archipelago.

This chapter explores some of the challenges and opportunities of locating the material cultures of watercraft in and through the literary record. As Roberta Frank's influential essay on the ‘odd couple’ of Beowulf and Sutton Hoo has shown us, when we take texts and objects to ‘illuminate’ one another, the affinity between them can become ‘exaggerated’. Yet the process of constructing worlds from absences can also provide occasion for thinking critically about the diverse material, cultural and political forces that shape any object in the past or present. Here, I look to depictions of ship-making and ship-breaking in Latin and Old English riddles from the fourth to the tenth centuries. Tracing the material maritime pasts and networks that are archived by riddle collections, I argue that the ship riddles articulate the ultimate paradox of watercraft; wooden vessels are simultaneously the pinnacle of human craftmanship and technological achievement, and enigmatic, breakable entities which evade complete human understanding and recovery in the present. Watercrafts, in weaving their way through the literary record, stand witness to the skill of their makers, but they also ultimately demand an engagement with the lost and the fragmentary by resisting present-day desires to find origins and fixed solutions.