Exeter Book Riddles


The Exeter Book riddles are a fragmentary collection of verse riddles in Old English found in the later tenth-century anthology of Old English poetry known as the Exeter Book. Today standing at around ninety-four, the Exeter Book riddles account for almost all the riddles attested in Old English, and a major component of the otherwise mostly Latin corpus of riddles from early medieval England.

Form and style

The riddles are all written in alliterative verse, and frequently end with an injunction to 'say what I am called', suggesting that they were recited as oral entertainment. Like other Old English poetry, the riddles make extensive use of compound nouns and adjectives. When metaphorical, these compounds become what could be considered riddles within the riddle itself, and the audience must be attentive to any double meanings or "hinge words" in order to discover the answer to the riddle. The riddles offer a new perspective on the mundane world and often poetically personify their subject. In this respect, they can be situated within a wider tradition of 'speaking objects' in Anglo-Saxon culture and have much in common with poems such as The Dream of the Rood and The Husband's Message and with artefacts such as the Franks Casket, Alfred Jewel, and Brussels Cross, which endow inanimate things with first-person voices.
Unlike the Latin riddles from early medieval England, the Old English ones tend not to rely on intellectual obscurity to make the riddle more difficult for the reader, rather focusing on describing processes of manufacture and transformation. And again in contrast to manuscripts of the Latin riddles, the Exeter Book does not state the solutions to its riddles. The search for their solutions has been addressed at length by Patrick J. Murphy, focusing on thought patterns of the period, but there is still no unanimous agreement on some of them.

Contents

The Exeter Book riddles are varied in theme, but they are all used to engage and challenge the readers mentally. By representing the familiar, material world from an oblique angle, many not only draw on but also complicate or challenge social norms such as martial masculinity, patriarchal attitudes to women, lords' dominance over their servants, and humans' over animals. Thirteen, for example, have as their solution an implement, which speaks of itself through the riddle as a servant to its lord; but these sometimes also suggest the power of the servant to define the master.
The majority of the riddles have religious themes and answers. Some of the religious contexts within the riddles are "manuscript book," "soul and body," "fish and river". The riddles also were written about common objects, and even animals were used as inspiration for some of the riddles. One example of a typical, religious riddle is Riddle 41, which describes the soul and body:
While the Exeter Book was found in a cathedral library, and while it is clear that religious scribes worked on the riddles, not all of the riddles in the book are religiously themed. Many of the answers to the riddles are everyday, common objects. There are also many double entendres, which can lead to an answer that is obscene. One example of this is Riddle 23/25:
One of the first answers that readers might think of would be an onion. If the reader pays close attention to the wording in the latter half of the riddle, however, he or she may be led to believe that the answer is a man's penis. Both of these answers are perfectly legitimate answers to this riddle, but one is very innocent where the other is obscene. Riddles in which such double entendre is thought to be prominent in the Exeter Book are: 2, 20, 25, 37, 42, 44, 45, 54, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 91. Even though some of the riddles contained obscene meanings, that is not to say that the majority of riddles in the Exeter Book were obscene. There were more religious and animalistic riddles than obscene riddles.
Since the riddles were crammed into the pages of the manuscript with hardly any organization, many of the riddles vary in structure. The boundaries between riddles were often unclear. In fact, some remain unanswered to this day, such as 95:

List of Exeter Book Riddles

The Exeter Book Riddles have the following solutions, and numbered according to the edition by Krapp and Dobbie.

Editions and translations

  • Andy Orchard, The Old English and Anglo-Latin Riddle Tradition, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 69 ; accompanied by Andy Orchard, A Commentary on the Old English and Anglo-Latin Riddle Tradition, Supplements to the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library.
  • , ed. by Megan Cavell and others, 2nd edn.
  • Martin Foys, et al. , with translations from the , Ophelia Eryn Hostetter.

    Edition only

  • The Riddles of the Exeter Book, ed. by Frederick Tupper, archive.org, Wikimedia Commons
  • Elliott van Kirk Dobbie and George Philip Krapp, The Exeter Book, Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records 3, digitised at https://web.archive.org/web/20181206091232/http://ota.ox.ac.uk/desc/3009
  • Craig Williamson,
  • Bernard J. Muir, The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry: An Edition of Exeter Dean and Chapter MS 3501, 2nd edn, 2 vols

    Translation only

  • Paull F. Baum, Anglo-Saxon Riddles of the Exeter Book, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_Riddles_of_the_Exeter_Book
  • Kevin Crossley-Holland, The Exeter Book Riddles, revised edition
  • Greg Delanty, Seamus Heaney and Michael Matto, The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation
  • F. H. Whitman, Old English Riddles
  • Craig Williamson, ''''