Anglo-Saxon riddles are a significant genre of

Anglo-Saxon literature Old English literature refers to poetry and prose written in Old English in early medieval England, from the 7th century to the decades after the Norman Conquest of 1066, a period often termed Anglo-Saxon England. The 7th-century work '' Cædmo ...

. The

riddle A riddle is a statement, question or phrase having a double or veiled meaning, put forth as a puzzle to be solved. Riddles are of two types: ''enigmas'', which are problems generally expressed in metaphorical or allegorical language that requ ...

was a major, prestigious literary form in early medieval England, and riddles were written both in Latin and Old English verse. The pre-eminent composer of Latin riddles in early medieval England was Aldhelm (d. 709), while the Old English verse riddles found in the tenth-century

Exeter Book The Exeter Book, also known as the Codex Exoniensis or Exeter Cathedral Library MS 3501, is a large codex of Old English poetry, believed to have been produced in the late tenth century AD. It is one of the four major manuscripts of Old Englis ...

include some of the most famous Old English poems.

History

Antique inspirations

Riddles are an internationally widespread feature of oral literatures and scholars have not doubted that they were traditional to Old English culture. But the history of riddles as a literary genre in England seems to be rooted in an influential collection of late Antique Latin riddles, possibly from north Africa, attributed to a poet called

Symphosius Symphosius (sometimes, in older scholarship and less properly, Symposius) was the author of the ''Aenigmata'', an influential collection of 100 Latin riddles, probably from the late antique period. They have been transmitted along with their soluti ...

, whose work English scholars emulated and adapted.

Aldhelm

As the

conversion of England to Christianity The Christianisation of Anglo-Saxon England was a process spanning the 7th century. It was essentially the result of the Gregorian mission of 597, which was joined by the efforts of the Hiberno-Scottish mission from the 630s. From the 8th centur ...

proceeded during the seventh century, Old English-speakers studied Latin and gained access to Latin literacy and literary traditions. Apparently relatively early in his career, a prominent early Christian aristocrat, scholar, abbot and bishop from Wessex, Aldhelm, composed the ''

Epistola ad Acircium The ''Epistola ad Acircium, sive Liber de septenario, et de metris, aenigmatibus ac pedum regulis'' ('letter to Acircius, or the book on sevens, and on metres, riddles, and the regulation of poetic feet') is a Latin treatise by the West-Saxon sch ...

'', a Latin treatise on the poetic arts. Apparently inspired by the hundred ''enigmata'' ('enigmas') of

, as well as another, possibly north-Italian collection of metrical Latin riddles known today as the

Bern Riddles The Bern Riddles, also known as ''Aenigmata Bernensia'', ''Aenigmata Hexasticha'' or ''Riddles of Tullius'', are a collection of 63 metrical Latin riddles, named after the location of their earliest surviving manuscript, which today is held in Be ...

, perhaps along with Byzantine literary riddling, Aldhelm included in this his own collection of one hundred hexametrical ''enigmata''.Andy Orchard, 'Enigmata', in ''The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England'', ed. by Michael Lapidge, John Blair, Simon Keynes, and Donald Scragg, 2nd edn (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2013), s.v. Aldhelm's most prominent themes were 'the natural world, daily life, church furniture, and the classroom. A bookish quality is evident in many of the other topics addressed, which would certainly have been outside the daily experience of Anglo-Saxon England'.

Bede, Tatwine, Eusebius, and Boniface

Perhaps because of its use in Anglo-Saxon education, Aldhelm's collection inspired several more Anglo-Latin riddle collections. Recent scholarship suggests that nineteen riddles attributed to Bede (d. 735) in an eleventh-century manuscript indeed belong to his partly lost ''

Liber epigrammatum The ''Liber epigrammatum'' is a collection of Latin epigrammatic poems composed by the Northumbrian monk Bede (d. 735). The modern title comes from a list of his works at the end of his '' Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum'' (V.24.2): "lib ...

''. Bede's contemporary

Tatwine Tatwine ( – 30 July 734) was the tenth Archbishop of Canterbury from 731 to 734. Prior to becoming archbishop, he was a monk and abbot of a Benedictine monastery. Besides his ecclesiastical career, Tatwine was a writer, and riddles he compo ...

(d. 734), a Mercian priest and Archbishop of Canterbury, composed forty acrostic riddles, which were supplemented by a further sixty attributed to a scholar with the name Eusebius whose identity is not securely known. These riddles of Tatwine and

riddles of Eusebius The ''Enigmata Eusebii'' (riddles of Eusebius) are a collection of sixty Latin, hexametrical riddles composed in early medieval England, probably in the eighth century. Example An example of Eusebius's work is enigma 42, on the dragon: Autho ...

survive in two manuscripts, as a set of one hundred riddles. It is almost certain that Tatwine had read the riddles of Aldhelm; Frederick Tupper believed that this influence was minimal, but subsequent scholars have argued that Tatwine's riddles owed a substantial debt to those of Aldhelm. Both Tatwine and Eusebius composed on everyday objects and abstract concepts, including the theological, philosophical, and mythological.Andy Orchard, "Enigma Variations: The Anglo-Saxon Riddle-Tradition," in ''Latin Learning and English Lore: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Literature for Michael Lapidge'', ed. by Andy Orchard and Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, 2 vols (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), I 284-304. Meanwhile, Saint Boniface (d. 754) composed a sequence of ten riddles on the virtues and another of ten on the vices. These were "for the moral instruction of an unnamed female correspondent", were influenced greatly by Aldhelm, and contained many references to works of

Vergil Publius Vergilius Maro (; traditional dates 15 October 7021 September 19 BC), usually called Virgil or Vergil ( ) in English, was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He composed three of the most famous poems in Latin literature: t ...

(the ''

Aeneid The ''Aeneid'' ( ; la, Aenē̆is or ) is a Latin epic poem, written by Virgil between 29 and 19 BC, that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who fled the fall of Troy and travelled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of th ...

'', the ''

Georgics The ''Georgics'' ( ; ) is a poem by Latin poet Virgil, likely published in 29 BCE. As the name suggests (from the Greek word , ''geōrgika'', i.e. "agricultural (things)") the subject of the poem is agriculture; but far from being an example ...

'', and the ''

Eclogues The ''Eclogues'' (; ), also called the ''Bucolics'', is the first of the three major works of the Latin poet Virgil. Background Taking as his generic model the Greek bucolic poetry of Theocritus, Virgil created a Roman version partly by offer ...

''). The Lorsch riddles are also thought to have been composed in Anglo-Saxon England.

Old English riddles

Aldhelm's Latin riddling was also inspiring the composition of riddles in Old English as early as the eighth century: this is attested by the

Leiden Riddle The "Leiden Riddle" is an Old English riddle (which also survives in a similar form in the Exeter Book known as Exeter Book Riddle 33 or 35). It is noteworthy for being one of the earliest attested pieces of English poetry; one of only a small numbe ...

, a translation of Aldhelm's riddle on the ''lorica'' (breastplate). However, the vast majority of Old English riddles are attested in the later tenth-century

, which in its current, fragmentary state contains around 94 riddles (scholars debate precisely how many there are because divisions between poems are not always clear). There is speculation that there may once have been, or have been intended to be, 100 riddles in the book, since this would match the Latin collections discussed above. The riddles are all written in

alliterative verse In prosody, alliterative verse is a form of verse that uses alliteration as the principal ornamental device to help indicate the underlying metrical structure, as opposed to other devices such as rhyme. The most commonly studied traditions of ...

; their solutions are not given, and several end with an injunction to 'say what I am called', suggesting that they were indeed recited as verbal entertainment; yet they clearly have diverse origins.Black, Joseph, et al., eds. ''The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: Volume 1: The Medieval Period''. 2nd ed. Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press,2009. Print.Lind, Carol. ''Riddling the voices of others: The Old English Exeter Book riddles and a pedagogy of the anonymous''. Diss. Illinois State University, 2007. The search for answers to the riddles 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. There are also two Old English prose riddles, surviving on folio 16v in the mid-eleventh-century psalter British Library, Cotton Vitellius E.xviii, made in Winchester, within a short text on secret codes, found among a collection of notes, charms, prayers, and computistical tables. The

Franks Casket The Franks Casket (or the Auzon Casket) is a small Anglo-Saxon whale's bone (not "whalebone" in the sense of baleen) chest from the early 8th century, now in the British Museum. The casket is densely decorated with knife-cut narrative scenes ...

, a box made of whale bone, also features a text written in Old English with

runic Runes are the letters in a set of related alphabets known as runic alphabets native to the Germanic peoples. Runes were used to write various Germanic languages (with some exceptions) before they adopted the Latin alphabet, and for specialised ...

script which some scholars have viewed as a riddle (with the proposed solution 'whale').

Scholarly interpretations

The Old English riddles have been much more studied than the Latin ones, but recent work has argued that the two groups need to be understood together as 'a vigorous, common tradition of Old English and Anglo-Latin enigmatography'. Much past work on the Old English riddles has focused on finding and debating solutions, but a new wave of work has started using riddles as a way to study Anglo-Saxon world-views through the critical approaches of

eco-criticism Ecocriticism is the study of literature and ecology from an interdisciplinary point of view, where literature scholars analyze texts that illustrate environmental concerns and examine the various ways literature treats the subject of nature. It w ...

. The Exeter Book riddles 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 Alfred Jewel or the Brussels Cross, which endow inanimate things with first-person voices. By representing the familiar, material world from an oblique angle, many riddles from early medieval England 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 Latin ''enigmata'' of Aldhelm and his Anglo-Latin successors are presented in manuscripts with their solutions as their title, and seldom close with a challenge to the reader to guess their solution. Unlike the Latin Anglo-Saxon riddles, 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. The reader must be observant to any double meanings or "hinge words" in order to discover the answer to the riddle.John D. Niles, '' Old English Enigmatic Poems and the Play of the Texts'', Studies in the early Middle Ages, 13 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006).

Editions and translations

All Anglo-Saxon riddles

* Andy Orchard (ed and trans), ''The Old English and Anglo-Latin Riddle Tradition'', Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 69 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021); accompanied by Andy Orchard, ''A Commentary on the Old English and Anglo-Latin Riddle Tradition'', Supplements to the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2021). *
The Riddle Ages: Early Medieval Riddles, Translations and Commentaries
', ed. by Megan Cavell and others, 2nd edn (Birmingham: University of Birmingham, 2020–).

The Exeter Book riddles only

Editions

*''The Riddles of the Exeter Book'', ed. by Frederick Tupper (Boston: Ginn, c1910),

archive.org The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...

Wikimedia Commons Wikimedia Commons (or simply Commons) is a media repository of free-to-use images, sounds, videos and other media. It is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation. Files from Wikimedia Commons can be used across all of the Wikimedia projects in ...

*Elliott van Kirk Dobbie and George Philip Krapp (eds), ''The Exeter Book'', Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), digitised at https://web.archive.org/web/20181206091232/http://ota.ox.ac.uk/desc/3009 * Craig Williamson (ed),
The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book
' (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977) * Bernard J. Muir (ed), ''The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry: An Edition of Exeter Dean and Chapter MS 3501'', 2nd edn, 2 vols (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000) * Martin Foys, ''et al.'' (eds.
''Old English Poetry in Facsimile Project''
(Madison, WI: Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture, 2019-).

Translations

* Paull F. Baum, ''Anglo-Saxon Riddles of the Exeter Book'' (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1963), https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_Riddles_of_the_Exeter_Book * Kevin Crossley-Holland (trans), ''The Exeter Book Riddles'', revised edition (London: Enitharmon Press, 2008) * Greg Delanty, Seamus Heaney and Michael Matto, ''The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation'' (New York: Norton, 2010) * F. H. Whitman (ed and trans), ''Old English Riddles'' (Ottawa: Canadian Federation for the Humanities, 1982) * Craig Williamson (trans),

' (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982)

Anglo-Latin riddles only

All Anglo-Latin riddles

* ''Tatuini omnia opera, Variae collectiones aenigmatum merovingicae aetatis, Anonymus de dubiis nominibus'', ed. by Fr. Glorie, trans. by Erika von Erhardt-Seebold, Corpus christianorum: series latina, 133-133a, 2 vols (Turnholt: Brepols, 1968)
vol Ivol II

Aldhelm's riddles only

* ''Aldhelmi Opera'', ed. by Rvdolfvs Ehwald, Monumenta Germanicae Historica, Auctorum Antiquissorum, 15, 3 vols (Berlin, 1919) * ''Aldhelm: The Poetic Works'', trans. by Michael Lapidge and James L. Rosier (Cambridge, 1985) * ''Through a Gloss Darkly: Aldhelm’s Riddles in the British Library ms Royal 12.C.xxiii'', ed. and trans. by Nancy Porter Stork, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Studies and Texts, 98 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1990) * ''Saint Aldhelm's "Riddles"'', ed. and trans. by A. M. Juster (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015)

References

{{Reflist Riddles Old English literature Old English poetry