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Exeter Book Riddle 74 and the play of the text

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

John D. Niles
John D. Niles
Affiliation:
University of California at Berkeley
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Extract

Riddle 74 is one of a handful of Old English riddles of the Exeter Book that have stubbornly resisted a solution. As Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson remark, ‘scholars have suggested answers…but none satisfies all the conditions set forth in the poem’. Peter Clemoes finds the attributes that are ascribed to this particular riddle-subject to be ‘so paradoxical that it seems impossible to name their possessor at all’. Riddles normally do have answers, however, and this one is no exception. My first aim in this article is to offer an answer to Riddle 74 that will put debate to rest as to its intended solution.

Type
Research Article
Information
Anglo-Saxon England , Volume 27 , December 1998 , pp. 169 - 207
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998

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References

1 The riddle is no. 74 in The Exeter Book, ed. Krapp, G. P. and Dobbie, E. V. K. (New York, 1936)Google Scholar, ASPR 3 (henceforth cited as K-D), and I shall follow common practice in referring to it by that number. It is no. 72 in The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book, ed. Williamson, C. (Chapel Hill, NC, 1977)Google Scholar, henceforth W in short citations. For assistance in the preparation of this essay I am indebted to the University of California, Berkeley, for a Humanities Research Fellowship and sabbatical leave during 1997–8; to the President and Fellows of Clare Hall, Cambridge; and to Andy Orchard, Donald Scragg and John Lindow for advice on particular points.

2 Mitchell, B. and Robinson, F. C., A Guide to Old English, 5th ed. (Oxford, 1992), p. 240.Google Scholar

3 Clemoes, P., Interactions of Thought and Language in Old English Poetry, CSASE 12 (Cambridge, 1995), 185.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 A facsimile has been published as The Exeter Book of Old English Poetry, with introductory chapters by Chambers, R. W.et al. (London, 1933)Google Scholar. For information with a possible bearing on the manuscript's early history, see Conner, P. W., Anglo-Saxon Exeter: a Tenth-Century Cultural History (Woodbridge, 1993), esp. pp. 48–94 (on paleographical context) and pp. 95–147Google Scholar (on codicology) and, for a more sceptical view, Gameson, R., ‘The Origin of the Exeter Book of Old English Poetry’, ASE 25 (1996), 135–85Google Scholar. Besides K-D, W and the facsimile, other editions that I have consulted are Codex Exoniensis, ed. Thorpe, B. (London, 1842)Google Scholar; The Riddles of the Exeter Book, ed. Tupper, F. Jr, (Boston, MA, 1910)Google Scholar; Old English Riddles, ed. Wyatt, A. J. (Boston, MA, 1912)Google Scholar; Die altenglischen Rätsel, ed. Trautmann, M. (Heidelberg, 1915)Google Scholar; The Exeter Book, pt 2, ed. Mackie, W S., EETS os 194 (Oxford, 1934)Google Scholar; Old English Riddles, ed. Whitman, F. H. (Ottawa, 1982)Google Scholar; Die altenglischen Rätsel des Exeterbuchs, ed. Pinsker, H. and Ziegler, W. (Heidelberg, 1985)Google Scholar; and The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry: an Edition of Exeter Dean and Chapter MS 3501, ed. Muir, B. J., 2 vols. (Exeter, 1994).Google Scholar

5 There are ninety-one riddles according to the Williamson count. The reason that this count varies from the K-D count is disagreement as to whether K-D riddles 1–3, 75–6 and 79–80 constitute separate poems or are parts of single poems. Williamson favours the latter conclusion and numbers these as riddles 1, 73 and 76, respectively, with the rest of his numeration adjusted accordingly.

6 See the more extended discussion of genre on pp. 198–9 below.Google Scholar

7 Klinck, A. L., The Old English Elegies: a Critical Edition and Genre Study (Montreal, 1992), p. 197.Google Scholar

8 The Exeter Book, ed. Muir, II, 624.Google Scholar

9 Since the manuscript text is unpunctuated apart from capitalization of Ic(line 1) and the inclusion of a full stop after cwicu (last line), there are various possible ways of punctuating the text in modern editions. These options have caused no more than minor debate, however, and I will pass over the question of punctuation now before returning to it after offering my proposed solution.

10 Cf. Riddle 10 (W8), verse 6a: Hæfde feorh cwico, ‘I had a living spirit’; Riddle 13 (W11), verse 3a: bæfdon feorg cwico, ‘they had living spirits’. To judge from these parallels. ferð functions as a variant of feorh or feorg, ‘life, soul’. Williamson, , following An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, ed. Bosworth, J. and Toller, T. N. (Oxford, 1898)Google Scholar, with Supplement, ed. Toller, T. N. (1921)Google Scholar and Revised and Enlarged Addenda by Campbell, A. (1972)Google Scholar (henceforth cited as B-T), lists ferð separately rom feorh in his glossary and glosses it ‘mind, spirit, life’, but the two words seem to be used interchangeably.

11 The Exeter Anthology, ed. I, Muir, 369Google Scholar; text identical with W, p. 109.Google Scholar What follows is a hyperliteral word-for-word translation: ‘I was (a) woman/girl young, (a) hair-gray woman/queen, and (a) peerless warrior/man in/at one time/season/hour; (I) flew among birds and in/on (the) sea swam, dived under (the) wave dead among fish/fishes, and stepped/walked on land – (I) had/held (a) spirit/soul (or souls) living.’

12 Riddles of the Exeter Book, ed. Tupper, , p. lxxxix, lists fifty riddles in this category.Google Scholar

13 I shall try to avoid referring to the speaker by any third-person-singular pronoun, as by its grammatical gender the wording ‘he’, ‘she’ or ‘it’ can prejudice a solution. Where the resulting awkwardness becomes intolerable I shall use ‘it’, with the justification that the neuter pronoun is the least likely to mislead, seeing that most of the Exeter Book riddles have an inanimate solution.

14 For discussion of this aspect of translation theory with examples drawn from Beowulf, see my ‘Rewriting Beowulf, the Task of Translation’, College Eng. 55 (1993), 858–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 The following examples are taken, respectively, from The Earliest English Poems, trans. Alexander, M. J. (Harmondsworth, 1966), p. 101Google Scholar, repr. with no change in his Old English Riddles from the Exeter Book (London, 1980), p. 73Google Scholar; The Exeter Riddle Book, trans. Crossley-Holland, K. (London, 1978), p. 91Google Scholar, repr. with no change in his The Exeter Book Riddles (Harmondsworth, 1979), p. 90Google Scholar; and A Feast of Creatures: Anglo-Saxon Riddle-Songs, trans. Williamson, C. (Philadelphia, PA, 1982), p. 134Google Scholar. Other translations of Riddle 74 that I have consulted are by Thorpe, , Codex Exoniensis, p. 487Google Scholar; Anglo-Saxon Riddles of the Exeter Book, trans. Baum, P. F. (Durham, NC, 1963), pp. 51–2Google Scholar; The Riddles of the Exeter Book, trans. Abbott, H. H. (Cambridge, 1968), p. 41Google Scholar; Old English Riddles, ed. Whitman, , p. 213Google Scholar; and Die altenglischen Rätsel, ed. Pinsker, and Ziegler, , p. 117.Google Scholar

16 Dictionary of Old English, ed. Amos, A. C.et al. (Toronto, 1987 –Google Scholar, henceforth DOE), fascicle C, s.v. cwene. The word normally means ‘woman’ or ‘wife’; specialized senses are ‘queen, empress’, ‘princess’ or ‘concubine’ (in reference to a priest's consort, or perhaps common-law wife). The word is used of the Virgin Mary as well as of historical queens of good repute.

17 OE feax denotes ‘hair’, as in ch. 33 of the Laws of Æthelberht, where feaxfang ‘pulling someone's hair’ is a legal offence subject to compensation of fifty sceattas, or the same amount that was exacted for rape of a slave of the second class (ch. 16): The Laws of the Earliest English Kings, ed. and trans. Attenborough, F. L. (Cambridge, 1922), pp. 8 and 6 respectively.Google Scholar

18 B–T; DOE, fascicle Æ, s.v. ænlic.

19 B–T, s.v. fæmne.

20 For a discussion of this theme in British popular literature, see Dugaw, D. M., Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650–1850 (Cambridge, 1989)Google Scholar. Although the theme has been exploited by writers from the time of Hervarar Saga to that of Maxine Kingston's, HongThe Woman Warrior (New York, 1976), its relevance to this riddle cannot be assumed.Google Scholar

21 ‘Uton nu bihealden þa wunderlice swiftnesse þare sawlie. Heo hafæð swa mycele swiftnesse, heo on ane tid, 3if heo wyle, bisceawiæð heofenum 7 ofer sæ flyhð, lond 7 bur3a 3eondfaræð’ (’Let us now consider the marvellous swiftness of the soul. It has such great speed that at a single time, if it wishes, it contemplates the heavens and flies over the sea and journeys through lands and cities’): Twelfth-Century Homilies in MS. Bodley 343, ed. Belfour, A. O., EETS os 137 (London, 1909), 88Google Scholar. This particular example is relevant to the solution to Riddle 74 that is proposed by Erhart-Siebolt (see below pp. 176–7Google Scholar).

22 For the plural, see verse 3a of Riddle 13 (W11); for the singular, verse 6a of Riddle 10 (W8), as cited above, p. 171, n. 10.Google Scholar

23 For a list of solutions to Exeter Book riddles proposed through the 1970s, see Fry, D. K., ‘Exeter Book Riddle Solutions’, OEN 15.1 (1981), 22–33, at 25 for Riddle 74.Google Scholar

24 Dietrich, F., ‘Die Räthsel des Exeterbuchs: Würdigung, Lösung und Herstellung’, Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum 11 (1859), 482.Google Scholar

25 ‘Die Räthsel des Exeterbuchs: Verfasser; weitere Lösungen’, Ibid. 12 (1865), 248.

26 Walz, J. A., ‘Notes on the Anglo-Saxon Riddles’, Stud. and Notes 5 (1896), 266–7.Google Scholar

27 The Riddles of Aldhelm, ed. and trans. Pitman, J. H. (New Haven, CT, 1925), pp. 10–11Google Scholar. Aldhelm's riddle describes a creature with scales that swims with fish and flies with birds, but that cannot breathe air. There was evidently some confusion in the Anglo-Latin tradition: the cuttlefish, a cephalopod mollusc related to the octopus, does not have scales.

28 Pliny, , Historia naturalis, vol. III (bks 8–11), ed. and trans. Rackham, H. (London, 1940), ix. 45 (pp. 218–19).Google Scholar

29 Trautmann offered this solution without any supporting argument in ‘Die Auflösungen der altenglischen Rätsel’, Beiblatt zur Anglia 5 (1894), 46–51Google Scholar. He argued his case fully in ‘Alte und neue Antworten auf altenglischen Rätsel’, Bonner Beiträge zur Anglistik 19 (1905), 201–3Google Scholar, and confirmed and nuanced it in his edition of 1915, Die altenglischen Rätsel, p. 128.Google Scholar

30 The feaxhar cwene could also be frost, I might add. Frost might seem long-haired and is clearly greyish; cf. ‘hoar-frost’, though the earliest use of this word is c. 1290, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., vol. VII (Oxford, 1989)Google Scholar, henceforth OED. This connection is supported by Riddle 93 (W89), lines 13–14, where the adjective har and the noun feax appear in conjunction with frost: hwilum hara scoc / forst of feaxe, ‘sometimes grey frost shook from his hair’ (according to one possible translation of this grammatically difficult clause).

31 Baum, P., Anglo-Saxon Riddles, suggests that if ‘water’ is the solution, then a more specific answer would be ‘rain’: he sees here a ‘gentle shower, a heavy downpour, in the sea its natural form (its life) is lost; a little imagination can see it as hail walking on the ground’ (p. 51).Google Scholar But this proposal makes little sense of feaxhar cwene and ferð cwicu.

32 Tupper, F., ‘Originals and Analogues of the Exeter Book Riddles’, Mod. Lang. Notes 18 (1903), 100CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘Solutions of the Exeter Book Riddles’, ibid. 21 (1906), 103–4; The Riddles of the Exeter Book (1910), pp. 214–15.Google Scholar

33 Holthausen, F., ‘Anglosaxonica Minora’, Beiblatt zur Anglia 36 (1925), 220.Google Scholar

34 Kitson, P., ‘Swans and Geese in Old English Riddles’, ASSAH 7 (1994), 79–84.Google Scholar Cf. Donoghue, , ‘An Anser’ (see below, p. 207)Google Scholar

35 von Erhardt-Siebold, E., ‘The Anglo-Saxon Riddle 74 and Empedokles’ Fragment 117', MÆ 15 (1946), 48–54Google Scholar, and ‘Note on Anglo-Saxon Riddle 74’, Ibid. 21 (1952), 36–7.

36 Whitman, F. H., ‘OE Riddle 74’, ELN 6 (1968), 1–5Google Scholar; Old English Riddles, ed. Whitman, (1982), pp. 144–8Google Scholar. The goose-feather solution is pursued by Göbel, H., ‘Studien zu den altenglischen Schriftwesenrätseln’, Epistemata: Würzburger wissenschaftliche Schriften, Reihe Literaturwissenschaft 7 (Würzburg, 1980), in an article I have not seen.Google Scholar

37 Whitman makes bold but rather desperate attempts to relate the rinc to the nib of the pen and fiscas to the cuttlefish, whose black fluid was sometimes used for ink in the ancient world though not, apparendy, in Anglo-Saxon England.

38 Kiernan, K., ‘The Mysteries of the Sea-Eagle in Exeter Riddle 74’, PQ 54 (1974), 518–22.Google Scholar

39 The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book, pp. 349–52.Google Scholar

40 See Bruce-Mitford, R., ‘Ships' Figure-Heads of the Migration Period’, in his Aspects of Anglo-Saxon Archaeology (London, 1974), pp. 175–87.Google Scholar

41 Other solutions to Riddle 74 have been proposed, but only the ones I have discussed call for serious consideration. Müller, E. opted for ‘sun’, during the boom years of solar mythology: Die Rätsel des Exeterbuchs (Cöthen, 1861), p. 19Google Scholar. Bragg, L., The Lyric Speakers of Old English Poetry (Rutherford, NJ, 1991)Google Scholar, posits a human speaker and takes that speaker's words literally, despite the difficulty one might have imagining what person could have satisfied the claims made in these five lines. In its blithe self-referentiality, Bragg's reading of the riddle is a concise expression of the school of thought that a poem means what it feels like: ‘This solution may not be the one intended by its author, but it is the one that brings this riddle to life for me, and that causes me to think most deeply about my own experiences’ (p. 52).

42 Barley, N. F., ‘Structural Aspects of the Anglo-Saxon Riddle’, Semiotica 10 (1974), 143–75, at 143–4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

43 Most of these solutions are drawn from Ben-Amos, D., ‘Solutions to Riddles’, Jnl of Amer. Folklore 89 (1976), 249–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar This issue of that journal (no. 352), ed. E. Köngäs Maranda, is devoted to the riddle.

44 The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Johnson, T. H., 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1963) III, 1010.Google Scholar Capitalization, punctuation and the apostrophe in line 6 follow Dickinson's usage.

45 Ibid. pp. 1011–12.

46 Quoted by Johnsgard, P. A., The Hummingbirds of North America (Washington, DC, 1983), p. 11. I rely on Johnsgard for the technical informadon given elsewhere in this paragraph. Johnsgard's pl. 16C is a colour illustration of the ruby-throated hummingbird.Google Scholar

47 Hirsch, E. D. Jr, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven, CT, 1967).Google Scholar

48 Pasternack, C. B., The Textuality of Old English Poetry, CSASE 13 (Cambridge, 1996), 12–21Google Scholar, reviews the problematics of authorship and audience in the Anglo-Saxon context without exhausting this potentially explosive subject.

49 Fish, S., Is There A Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA, 1980).Google Scholar

50 Armstrong, P. B., Conflicting Readings: Variety and Validity in Interpretation (Chapel Hill, NC, 1990).Google Scholar

51 Paradoxically, ‘hard’ relativism can be called an absolutist position, for it categorically denies a locus for validity in interpretation outside the mind of the individual interpreter.

52 The Foucault Reader, ed. Rabinow, P. (Harmondsworth, 1986), p. 385.Google Scholar

53 Greenfield, S. B., The Interpretation of Old English Poems (London, 1972), esp. ch. 1:Google Scholar‘Towards a Critical Framework’ (pp. 1–29).Google Scholar

54 Barley, , ‘Structural Aspects of the Anglo-Saxon Riddle’, raises the issue of validity, but only in the course of a short paragraph (p. 152).Google Scholar More helpfully, he then works through the process by which specific riddles can be disambiguated. Heeding Ben-Amos, ‘Solutions to Riddles’, we should not forget that in a social context, riddling is a deliberate and sometimes even tyrannical manipulation of truth. A riddle has multiple solutions, any of which can be considered valid by its solver, even though only one is accepted by the person posing the riddle at a given moment.

55 Spitzer, L., Linguistics and Literary History (Princeton, NJ, 1948), pp. 7 and 19.Google Scholar

56 Sorrell, P., ‘Oaks, Ships, Riddles and the Old English Rune Poem’, ASE 19 (1990), 103–16, at 109, n. 26Google Scholar, lists as other examples of ‘transformation’ riddles nos. 26, 28, 73 and 83, with reference also to 9, 12, 27 and 77.

57 Beowulf, ed. Klaeber, F., 3rd ed. (Boston, MA, 1950), p. 9 (lines 217–18)Google Scholar: Then the foamy-necked floater [the ship] departed over the ocean, impelled by the wind, most like a bird…’

58 Ibid. p. 71 (lines 1912b-1913): ‘The ship sped ashore, it came to rest on land.’

59 This suggestion is in accord with the system of Old English poetic diction, for ship-kennings in Old English can take a word for ‘wood’ as their base; examples are brimiwudu, flodwudu, sæwudu, sundwudu 'sea-wood’ and wægbord, wægþel ‘wave plank’ (B-T). Similarly, the simplex nouns beam ‘beam’ and bord ‘board’ can metaphorically designate ‘ship’; see B-T, beam sense IV, bord sense III; DOE, bord sense 2.

60 The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle MS D, ed. Cubbin, G. P., The AS Chronicle: a Collaborative Edition 6 (Cambridge, 1996), p. 80: ‘This news was then brought to King Harold, and he then mustered a great army and came against him [Duke William] at the old grey apple-tree.’Google Scholar

61 A Microfiche Concordance to Old English, ed. Healey, A. diP. and Venezky, R. L. (Toronto and Newark, DE, 1980)Google Scholar, s.v. haran. The specific charters, using the Microfiche system of numeration (which gives cross-references to published sources), are S nos. 142, 179, 378, 411, 412, 455, 470, 491, 508, 558, 560, 563, 609, 690, 695, 766, 800, 847, 881, 896, 911, 916, 962, 967, 969 (apuldran), 969 again (wiðig), 993, 999, 1001, 1006, 1010, 1272, 1314, 1380, 1542 and 1819.

62 See B-T (both main volume and supplement by Toller), s.v. har, note also the OED, s.v. hoar, sense 3: ‘The meaning may have been “grey” simply, or with lichen, and so “grey with age”, “old, ancient”.’

63 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. Tolkien, J. R. R. and Gordon, E. V., 2nd ed., rev. by Davis, N. (Oxford, 1967), p. 21 (line 743): ‘huge, hoary oaks, a hundred together’.Google Scholar

64 I have found reference in the archaeological literature to ash, aspen, poplar, larch, elm, lime and pine being used in northern regions; this list is unlikely to be exhaustive.

65 Christensen, A. E., ‘Scandinavian Ships from Earliest Times to the Vikings’, A History of Seafaring, Based on Underwater Archaeology, ed. Bass, G. F. (London, 1972), pp. 159–80, at 164.Google Scholar

66 ‘Although it has proved impossible to make any formal identification of the wood used, the wood grain, preserved in the iron oxides from the rivets, has a denseness similar to that of oak and it is probable that oak planking was used’: Evans, A. C. and Bruce-Mitford, R., ‘The Ship’, ch. 5 (pp. 345–435) of The Sutton Hoo Ship Burial I, ed. Bruce-Mitford, , 3 vols. (London, 1975), at 354.Google Scholar

67 Christensen, , ‘Scandinavian Ships’.Google Scholar

68 Brøgger, A. W. and Shetelig, H., The Viking Ships: their Ancestry and Evolution, trans. John, K. (Oslo, 1953), pp. 112, 147 and 154.Google Scholar

69 Ibid. p. 108.

70 As Williamson, notes (Old English Riddles, p. 345)Google Scholar, The motif of the flourishing tree, uprooted and carried off to another fate, is common to Rids. 71 [=K-D 73] and 51 [=K-D 53, ‘batteringram’] and also to The Dream of the Rood (lines 28ff.), and perhaps to the lost beginning of The Husband's Message’ Williamson also observes that die author of the Rune Poem plays on this double meaning of ‘ash tree’ and ‘spear’ in those lines (81–3) that accompany the æsc rune.

71 Aelfrics Grammatik und Glossar, ed. Zupitza, J. (1880; repr. with new foreword, Berlin, 1966), p. 18, lines 5–9Google Scholar, with my own capitalization and punctuation: ‘As to gender: there are two genders in nouns, masculine and feminine; that is, male and female. The male gender is hic vir “this man”, the female is haec femina “this woman”. These two genders occur naturally among both human beings and beasts.’ Ælfric then defines the neuter gender as naðor cynn, ne werlices ne wiflices, ‘neither gender, neither male nor female’.

72 Trautmann, M., ‘Alte und neue Antworten auf altenglischen Rätsel’, Bönner Beiträge zur Anglistik 19 (1905), 167–215, at 181.Google Scholar

73 Old English Riddles, ed. Whitman, , pp. 135–6.Google Scholar

74 Riddles of the Exeter Book, ed. Tupper, , p. lxxxix.Google Scholar See the end of his long footnote on pages lxxxix-xc for examples.

75 ‘Woman is called in metaphorical speech by all feminine tree-names’. See also ch. 46: ‘woman is the Willow, or Dealer, of that gold which she gives; and the willow is a tree. Therefore, as is already shown, woman is periphrased with all manner of feminine tree-names.’ The Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, trans. Brodeur, A. G. (New York, 1923), pp. 143 and 177Google Scholar, respectively. For examples of woman-kennings based on oak trees, see Lexicon Poeticum Antiquae Linguae Septentrionalis, ed. Jonsson, F., 2nd ed. (Copenhagen, 1966)Google Scholar, s.v. eik, and for close discussion of one example, see Brodeur, A. G., The Art of Beowulf (Berkeley, CA, 1959), p. 249.Google Scholar Male tree-kennings are also commonplace, of course; that fact does not negate the evidence cited here.

76 Meissner, R., Die Kenningar der Skalden (Bonn, 1921)Google Scholar, notes in his section 85, on ship-kennings, that Old Norse court poets used words for tree or wood to designate the keel or mast of a ship, hence the ship itself: ‘Es ist der lebende Baum, der sein Dasein als Schiff weiterführt, wobei vor allem an Kiel oder Mast gedacht wird’ (p. 208). This usage is consistent with what we find in Latin exegetical tradition, where the image of the ship as a figure of Ecclesia rests upon the association of the lignum ‘wood’ of the Cross with the wood of which the ship is made, so that lignum alone can serve as a synecdoche for ‘ship’: see , P. and Dronke, U., Growth of Literature: the Sea and the God of the Sea, H. M. Chadwick Memorial Lectures 8 (Cambridge, 1997), p. 12.Google Scholar

77 Brøgger, and Shetelig, , The Viking Ships, pp. 104–5.Google Scholar

78 My translations of ic wæs as ‘I have been’ (in the perfect tense) and hæfde as ‘I had’ (in a pluperfect sense) deserve comment. In the Old English text, all six verbs are in the simple past tense. As Bruce Mitchell points out in ‘Linguistic Facts and the Interpretation of Old English Poetry’, ASE 4 (1975), 17–24Google Scholar, and in Old English Syntax, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1985), §§ 633–44Google Scholar, the Old English past tense is sometimes to be translated in Modern English by a perfect or pluperfect construction. Normally either semantic context or the presence of a limiting adverb, however, clarifies the temporal meaning of a verb if something other than the simple past is meant. Although critics and translators of poetry have sometimes opted for pluperfect translations in a clause where nothing marks the verb as something other than the simple past, Mitchell argues that the burden of proof is on those who claim that the pluperfect is meant (Old English Syntax, § 644Google Scholar). In a riddle, however, are overt markers for perfect or pluperfect constructions necessarily to be expected, when the whole art of the riddle is to deceive? No linguistic ‘facts’ determine the answer to this question. We have a choice of interpretative options, and our choice determines a semantic context wherein the action of the verb is to be understood. For examples of changes in the sense of past-tense verbs in The Wife's Lament and The Dream of the Rood, see Wentersdorf, K., ‘The Situation of the Narrator in the Old English Wife's Lament’, Speculum 56 (1981), 492–516CrossRefGoogle Scholar, repr. in Old English Shorter Poems: Basic Readings, ed. O'Keeffe, K. O'Brien (New York, 1994), pp. 357–92, at 358–61.Google Scholar

79 Homilies of Ælfric: a Supplementary Collection, ed. Pope, J. C., 2 vols., EETS os 259–60 (Oxford, 1967–1968) II, homily 14 (for the sixth Sunday after Pentecost), lines 1–2, p. 515.Google Scholar

80 Aelfrics Grammatik, ed. Zupitza, , p. 270, lines 6–7.Google Scholar

81 Ælfric's Catholic Homilies. The First Series. Text, ed. Clemoes, P., EETS ss 17 (Oxford, 1997), p. 355:Google Scholar There are three ages in this world: the first was when there was no law, the second was under law [that is, Mosaic law], the third is now after the advent of Christ.’

82 Tupper begins his learned discussion of the Exeter Book riddles with a section on The Comparative Study of Riddles’ (pp. xi-xxvi), berating prior scholars for neglecting this aspect of their subject.

83 The Old English Rune Poem: a Critical Edition, ed. Halsall, M. (Toronto, 1981), p. 92:CrossRefGoogle Scholar ‘The oak is food for flesh [i.e. yields acorns to feed swine] for the children of men; often it travels over the gannet's bath [the ocean]; the open sea tests whether the oak keeps good faith.’ In her commentary on this stanza (p. 153), Halsall notes that ‘the oak becomes a kind of amphibian’, for it both stands on eorþan (on earth) and moves ofer ganotes bœþ (upon the sea). She also notes that seafaring is traditionally described in ‘somewhat heroic terminology’.

84 This subject is frequently represented in medieval manuscript illustrations of the labours of the months; for Anglo-Saxon examples, see Webster, J. C., The Labors of the Month in Antique and Medieval Art (Evanston, IL, 1938), pp. 53–5Google Scholar, with pl. 33b, item 3 (showing September from London, BL, Cotton Julius A. vi) and pl. 34b, item 3 (showing September from London, BL, Cotton Tiberius B. v).

85 Sorrell, , ‘Oaks, Ships, Riddles’.Google Scholar

86 Taylor, A., English Riddles from Oral Tradition (Berkeley, CA, 1951), pp. 309–11Google Scholar: ‘The Dead Bears the Living: A Ship’.

87 Sorrell, , ‘Oaks, Ships, Riddles’, p. 104 and n. 8.Google Scholar

88 A Lithuanian example, from Taylor, , English Riddles, p. 309.Google Scholar

89 Ibid. p. 310.

90 Michaels, A., Fugitive Pieces (London, 1998), p. 28.Google Scholar

91 Ricoeur, P., ‘The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text’, in his From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II, trans. Blarney, K. and Thompson, J. B. (London, 1991), pp. 144–69, at 169.Google Scholar

92 For this observation I am indebted to my former student Mary Bucholtz, who arrived at this insight before I had become aware of international riddle-type 828.

93 Since the comparative method as used here depends on the work of folklorists, my results give reason to question the claim that the relevance of late medieval, renaissance, or early modern English folklore to Old English riddles is ‘doubtful at best’ (Williamson, , Old English Riddles, p. 22Google Scholar).

94 Parks, W. comments on this oxymoron of ‘speaking books’ in his fine article ‘The Traditional Narrator and the “I Heard” Formulas in Old English Poetry’, ASE 16 (1987), 45–66Google Scholar; cf. Foley, J. M., ‘Texts That Speak to Readers Who Hear: Old English Poetry and the Languages of Oral Tradition’, Speaking Two Languages: Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies, ed. Frantzen, A. J. (Albany, NY, 1991), pp. 141–56.Google Scholar

95 Abrahams, R., ‘The Literary Study of the Riddle’, Texas Stud, in Lit. and Lang. 14 (1972), 177–97Google Scholar, argues strongly that social riddling is a group enterprise, a test of wits that is open to all members of a community, as opposed to its being a test of knowledge that is directed to an elite, as some have claimed.

96 Arguments along this line have been opened up by Adams, J. F., “The Anglo-Saxon Riddle as Lyric Mode’, Criticism 7 (1965), 335–48Google Scholar, and Marino, M., ‘The Literariness of the Exeter Book Riddles’, NM 79 (1978), 258–65.Google Scholar

97 Williamson, (pp. 25–6)Google Scholar, following earlier editors and commentators, distinguishes two main kinds of Old English riddle: one that begins with the conventional opening Ic eom or Ic wæs and one that begins typically with Ic seah or Ic gefrægn or Wiht is. Needless to say, these markers are not sufficient to identify a riddle as such. Some riddles lack them, while the same phrases occur in poems that are not riddles. All scholars agree that riddles either state or imply a question, but that does not take us far toward a definition.

98 Orchard, A., ‘Artful Alliteration in Anglo-Saxon Song and Story’, Anglia 113 (1995), 429–63, at 437.Google Scholar

99 Nelson, M., ‘The Rhetoric of the Exeter Book Riddles’, Speculum 49 (1974), 421–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

100 Stanley, E. G., ‘Old English Poetic Diction and the Interpretation of The Wanderer, The Seafarer, and The Penitent's Prayer’, Anglia 73 (1955), 413–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar, repr. in Essential Articles for the Study of Old English Poetry, ed. Bessinger, J. B. Jr, and Kahrl, S. J. (Hamden, CT, 1968), pp. 458–514, at 487–90Google Scholar, identifies the use of first person singular verbs as characteristic of the elegies and frequent in the riddles. Note further Bragg, The Lyric Speakers of Old English Poetry. Johnson, W. R., The Idea of Lyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and Modern Poetry (Berkeley, CA, 1982)Google Scholar, devotes a good deal of his first chapter, on defining lyric poetry, to a discussion of first-person address and the ‘I/thou’ relationship that use of the first-person pronoun establishes.

101 ‘Nowhere else in Old English verse do we find a treatment of natural phenomena comparable in length, realism, or descriptive skill’: Kennedy, C. W., The Earliest English Poetry (Oxford, 1943), p. 142.Google Scholar

102 Whitman, , Old English Riddles, p. 47.Google Scholar

103 For discussion of these two poems’ genre and their vexed relationship, see Klinck, , The Old English Elegies, pp. 20, 56–60 and 197–9.Google Scholar

104 Ibid. p. 49.

105 Davidson, A., ‘Interpreting Wulf and Eadwacer’, Annuale Mediaevale 16 (1975), 24–32Google Scholar. Similarly, H. Aertsen accepts the possibility that the author of this poem ‘allowed … multiple readings on purpose’ so as to lend it the appeal of an enigma: ‘Wulf and Eadwacer. a Woman's cri de coeur – For Whom, For What?’, Companion to Old English Poetry, ed. Aertsen, H. and Bremmer, R. H. Jr, (Amsterdam, 1994), pp. 119–44, at 120.Google Scholar On pp. 125–9 Aertsen discusses in some detail the ‘riddle’ interpretations of Wulf and Eadwacer.

106 Olsen, A., ‘Old English Women, Old English Men’, Old English Shorter Poems, ed. O'Keeffe, O'Brien, pp. 65–83, at 69.Google Scholar

107 Walker-Pelkey, F., ‘Frige hwæt ic hatte: “The Wife's Lament” as Riddle’, Papers on Lang, and Lit. 28 (1992), 242–66.Google Scholar

108 Wentersdorf, , ‘The Situation of the Narrator’, pp. 357–8.Google Scholar

109 Armstrong, , in Conflicting Readings (esp. pp. 17–18)Google Scholar, argues that any act of interpretation depends on an initial ‘act of faith’ that permits exploration of a subject. He accepts that different interpreters may opt for different initial stances, so that all that is available to them in the end is consistency within a system, not absolute truth. By arguing that one's initial choice of assumptions is an ethical act that may have political consequences, he aligns himself with Hirsch (and, with lesser emphasis, Ricoeur) as opposed to Fish. One could regard Armstrong's book as an effort to rationalize and humanize what could otherwise be a distastefully narcissistic relativism.

110 Thorpe, B., Codex Exoniensis, p. viiiGoogle Scholar. More recently R. North, discussing the genre of The Wanderer, has concluded that ‘riddle’ seems ‘a good term for this poem of a notably veiled allusive style’: see his ‘Boethius and the Mercenary in The Wanderer’, Pagans and Christians: the Interplay between Christian Latin and Traditional Germanic Cultures in Early Medieval Europe, ed. Hofstra, T. et al. (Groningen, 1995), pp. 71–98, at 92.Google Scholar

111 Both of these poems have been linked with the riddles. M. Irvine examines The Dream of the Road as a riddle-like text in ‘Anglo-Saxon Literary Theory Exemplified in Old English Poems: Interpreting the Cross in The Dream of the Road and Elene’, Old English Shorter Poems, ed. O'Keeffe, O'Brien, pp. 31–63, at 35–8Google Scholar. Halsall, M., in her edition of The Old English Rune Poem, pp. 25–6 and 85Google Scholar, concludes that the lost original of that poem did not include the names of the runes. If this reasonable surmise is correct, then a member of the original audience could not have read the poem correctly without a prior knowledge of runes. The poem would thus have been an exercise in cryptography, on top of its other challenges.

112 Hansen, E. T., The Solomon Complex: Reading Wisdom in Old English Poetry (Toronto, 1988), p. 127Google Scholar, paraphrasing Marino, M., ‘The Literariness of the Exeter Book Riddles’, p. 259Google Scholar. Throughout, ch. 5 of her book (pp. 126–52)Google Scholar, Hansen discusses the art of the Exeter Book riddles not with an eye to their solutions, but rather as poems with conventional features and as an ostensible speech situation. She likens them to the charms, in particular, as well as to the wisdom debate or monologue, and she discusses these genres within the general context of ‘wisdom literature’, a class of writings that she sees as challenging the normal categories through which people construct reality. Similarly, Tigges, W., ‘Snakes and Ladders: Ambiguity and Coherence in the Exeter Book Riddles and Maxims’, Companion to Old English Poetry, ed. Aertsen, and Bremmer, , pp. 95–118Google Scholar, compares riddles and maxims as two entries to a single body of knowledge and set of perceptions. It may be asked to what extent the qualities that Hansen and others associate with ‘wisdom literature’ are confined to that class of writings or are characteristic of poetry in general.

113 Hall, J. R., ‘Perspective and Wordplay in the Old English Rune Poem’, Neophilologus 61 (1977), 453–60, at 458.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

114 The Rune Poem is riddle-like but is not part of the Exeter Book. On the other hand, some of the poems included in the Exeter Book are not particularly enigmatic. My generalization therefore applies not to this one poetic codex, but rather to a type of poetry that is commonly practised there and that is sometimes practised elsewhere.

115 Nelson, , ‘The Rhetoric of the Exeter Book Riddles’, p. 424.Google Scholar

116 Huizinga, J., Homo Ludens: a Study of the Play-Element in Culture, trans. Hull, R. F. C. (1949; repr. London, 1970, with introduction by G. Steiner), ch. 7 (‘Play and Poetry’), pp. 141–58. On pp. 156–8 Huizinga discusses riddles and poetry as two closely related forms of expression.Google Scholar

117 Iser, W., Prospecting. From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore, MD, 1989), p. 250.Google Scholar

118 We still routinely speak of an author's ‘audience’, for example, as if readers were listening to speech rather than deciphering visual glyphs. Some modern authors (like Henry Fielding in Tom Jones) address the reader familiarly, as if in personal conversation, thus adapting a ‘listener-response’ rhetoric that has long been conventional in sermons, as in the prologues and epilogues of plays.

119 Dundes, A., ‘Thinking Ahead: a Folkloristic Reflection of the Future Orientation in American Worldview’, Anthropological Quarterly 42 (1969), 53–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar, repr. in his, Interpreting Folklore (Bloomington, IN, 1980), pp. 69–85 and 264–5, at p. 70Google Scholar. Other influential studies of worldview include Redfield, R., ‘Primitive World View and Civilization’, in his The Primitive World and its Transformations (Ithaca, NY, 1953), pp. 84–110Google Scholar, and Geertz, C., ‘Ethos, World-View and the Analysis of Sacred Symbols’ Antioch Rev. 17 (1957), 421–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar, repr. in Dundes, A., Every Man His Way: Readings in Cultural Anthropology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1968), pp. 301–15Google Scholar. Gurevich, A., Historical Anthropology of the Middle Ages, ed. Howlett, J. (Chicago, IL, 1992), ch. 1 (pp. 3–20)Google Scholar, reviews the importance of ‘worldview’ in recent historiography under the guise of many different names, including mentalité, ‘collective consciousness’ and ‘picture of the world’.

120 Riddles of the Exeter Book, ed. Tupper, , p. lxxxvi.Google Scholar

121 Tigges, , ‘Snakes and Ladders’, p. 95Google Scholar, with reference to a phrase, ‘environment of images’, that Lee, A. uses to good effect in his book The Guest-Hall of Eden: Four Essays on the Design of Old English Poetry (New Haven, CT, 1972), p. 231.Google Scholar

122 See Riddles of the Exeter Book, ed. Tupper, , p. lxxxviiiGoogle Scholar; Tigges, , ‘Snakes and Ladders’, p. 99Google Scholar; Hansen, , The Solomon Complex, pp. 137–8.Google Scholar

123 Whitman, , Old English Riddles, p. 51.Google Scholar

124 Tigges, , ‘Snakes and Ladders’, p. 109.Google Scholar

125 Irving, E. B. Jr, ‘Heroic Experience in the Old English Riddles’, Old English Shorter Poems, ed. O'Keeffe, O'Brien, pp. 199–212, at 199.Google Scholar

126 See Lieber, M. D., ‘Riddles, Cultural Categories, and World View’, Jnl of Amer. Folklore 89 (1976), 255–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Barley, ‘Structural Aspects of the Anglo-Saxon Riddle’, writes about riddles from an anthropological perspective with attention to their world-building capabilities, as does Hamnett, I., ‘Ambiguity, Classification and Change: the Function of Riddles’, Man ns 2 (1967), 379–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

127 Riddles of the Exeter Book, ed. Tupper, , p. vii.Google Scholar

128 Iser, , Prospecting, p. 252.Google Scholar