Liber epigrammatum

The Liber epigrammatum is a collection of Latin epigrammatic poems composed by the Northumbrian monk Bede. The modern title comes from a list of his works at the end of his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum : "librum epigrammatum heroico metro siue elegiaco".

Attestation and contents

Although the collection no longer survives complete, much of its content has been reconstructed by Michael Lapidge from scattered attestations of appropriate verse attributed to Bede. Within decades of Bede's death, the Liber epigrammatum had been partly incorporated into a sylloge of similar verse by Milred of Worcester. While all that survives of Milred's sylloge is a single medieval manuscript fragment, that manuscript was seen in a more complete form by the antiquary John Leland, whose notes on its contents survive. Other poetry by Bede that could plausibly have been included in the Liber epigrammatum was transmitted by other medieval anthologists. In the estimation of Michael Lapidge,

in the end, it was probably the very disparate nature of the contents of the Liber epigrammatum—''tituli, epitaphs, prayers, psalm paraphrases, etc.—which invited individual compilers to select individual items from the collection rather than to make the effort to copy the collection entire; and that, presumably, is why the Liber epigrammatum'' has not come down to us intact.

In Lapidge's reconstruction, the collection included the following works, which survive in whole or in part:

''Aenigmata''

A significant work of the Liber epigrammatum is nineteen aenigmata, which survive only in Cambridge, Cambridge University Library Gg.5.35, a manuscript otherwise noted for containing the Carmina cantabrigensia, but also containing collections of Latin riddles by Symphosius, Boniface, Aldhelm, Tatwine, and Eusebius. Although Frederick Tupper doubted the attribution to Bede, Lapidge has found that metrical and grammatical infelicities in the material can be explained by scribal transmission following composition, and that the works plausibly belong to Bede. Subsequently, Andy Orchard was equivocal on the question. The riddles are accompanied by an extensive commentary.
In Tupper's estimation, Lapidge edited the riddles as one thirty-two-line poem:

number	lines	Latin solution	English explanation
1	1-5		a meditation on how Hell can seem more valuable than Heaven
2	6	F. M. Mel.	the letters f and m: by switching them, the word fel changes to mel
3	7	Os.	this monosyllable can mean both 'mouth' and 'bone'
4	8	Amor.	the word amor which, reversed, reads Roma
5	9	Omen.	the word omen
6	10	Seges.	cornfield
7	11	Apes.	bees
8	12	I.	the letter I
9	13	O.	the letter O
10	14	Bonus.	the word bonus
11	15	Peruersus.	the word peruersus
12	16	Navis.	ship
13	17-19	O. u. a.	the letters O, u, and a
14	20-21		arrow
15	22		Judgement Day
16	23		Aetas hominis
17	24-27		whale
18	28-32	Digiti.	a meditation on the fingers as they write and produce scribal errors

Examples

Most of Bede's aenigmata are logogriphs, for example 11, "Peruersus bonus est, breuitati si caput absit". The solution to this riddle is that if one removes the first syllable from the word peruersus one gets the word uersus, which means "changes". A few are true riddles, however, including 17 :
As glossed by Lapidge,

the "guest from the sea" is apparently a whale ; its blubber provides oil for lamps and lighting ; no other sea-creature feeds off it, but its flesh feeds an entire population; although it perishes through the skill of a single whaler, that whaler could not consume it by himself: indeed the whale could not be consumed in a single day.

Editions

Frederick Tupper, Jr., , Modern Philology, 2, 561-72.
Michael Lapidge, ed. and tr. Bede's Latin Poetry''. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2019..