Adrian and Ritheus
Adrian and Ritheus is an Old English prose literary text preserved in British Library manuscript Cotton Julius A ii, fols 137v-140. It consists of a dialogue of forty-eight formulaic questions and answers between the titular 'Adrianus' and 'Ritheus'. Adrianus interrogates Ritheus using the formulaic expression Saga me ; Ritheus responds using the formulaic Ic þe secge. The nature of the questions posed varies between the factual and the enigmatic, but the style of questioning is "usually short and to the point".
Analogues and origins
Many of the questions asked in Adrian and Ritheus are also featured in the prose version of Solomon and Saturn, a text with "clear relationships" to the former. Twenty of Adrian and RitheusAnother source is the popular Joca Monachorum, whose question formula Dic mihi is the direct Latin equivalent to the Old English Saga me.
Christ's ectopic birth
In the 41st question of the dialogue, Adrianus asks of Ritheus,Saga me hu wæs crist acenned of maria his meder.To this, Ritheus replies,
Ic þe secge, ðurc þæt swiðre breost.Speculation that the Virgin Mary did not give birth to Christ in the natural fashion was not settled officially until the First Lateran Council of 1123. Nonetheless, Ratramnus and Radbertus, both of Corbie, Francia, would each write a treatise discussing the parturition during the ninth century. The latter satirises the notion that Christ was born from an orifice other than the womb, which suggests that such a belief was held by his some of Radbertus' Frankish contemporaries. Meanwhile, the trope of characters being born from their mother's side is common in Irish legend; Greenfield and Calder consider Irish folklore a significant influence on Adrian and Ritheus
Proper names in the text
Place names
Glið
In question 6, Adrianus asks Ritheus where the sun shines at night, who answers that it shines on three places: the belly of a whale called Leviathan; then Hell; then an island called Glið, where "the souls of holy men rest until Doomsday". Alongside the heavenly implications of the resting place of "holy men", Pheifer suggests this could be the result of a series of scribal mistranscriptions of gliew or gleow because of the proximity of graphemes <þ> and <''ƿ>.''Malifica and Intimphonis
In question 19 of the dialogue, Adrianus asks Ritheus to tell him "who are the two men in Paradise, and these continually weep and are sorrowful", to which Ritheus answers "Henoch and Elias". Adrianus then asks where they live, to which Ritheus replies,Ic þe secge, Malifica and Intimphonis; þæt is on simfelda and on sceanfeldaCross and Hill suggest that the name Intimphonis and sceanfelda may be accounted for by the fact that two glosses in works by Aldhelm would gloss the verbally-similar Latin In tempis to the verbally-similar Old English on scenfeldum. They further suggest that simfelda may be a scribal mistranscription of sinnfelda, thus likening it conceptually to Malifica, which seems to echo Latin maleficium.
.
Wright reads sceanfelda as scinfelda, which Roberts speculates may derive from the noun scinn 'spectre'. Another reading is Kemble's sunfelda.