Exeter Book Riddle 30 (according to the numbering of the

Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records (ASPR) is a six-volume edition intended at the time of its publication to encompass all known Old English poetry. Despite many subsequent editions of individual poems or collections, it has remained the standard refere ...

) is one of the

Old English Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th c ...

riddles 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 ...

found in the later 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 ...

. Since the suggestion of F. A. Blackburn in 1901, its solution has been agreed to be the Old English word ''bēam'', understood both in its primary sense 'tree' but also in its secondary sense 'cross'. The riddle is particularly important because it actually appears twice in the Exeter Book, on folios 108r (numbered 30a in the

) and 122v (numbered 30b). Parts of 30b are missing due to burn damage to the manuscript. This makes Riddle 30 a rare example of an Old English poem surviving in two copies (in this case both by the same scribe). The copies are fairly different, and these differences seem more likely to have arisen from scribal rather than memorial transmission. In the assessment of Roy M. Liuzza, '30b is rhetorically a decidedly more forceful poem than 30a'.

Text

As transcribed by Roy M. Liuzza and translated by Pirkko Koppinen, Riddle 30's text is thus:

Editions

* Foys, Martin ''et al.'
''Old English Poetry in Facsimile Project''
(Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2019-). * Krapp, George Philip and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie (eds), ''The Exeter Book'', The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), pp. 195-96, 224-25, http://ota.ox.ac.uk/text/3009.html. * Williamson, Craig (ed.), ''The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book'' (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), no. 28. * Muir, Bernard J. (ed.), ''The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry: An Edition of Exeter Dean and Chapter MS 3501'', 2nd edn, 2 vols (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2000).

Recordings

* Michael D. C. Drout,
Riddle 30a
, performed from the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records edition (9 November 2007). * Michael D. C. Drout,
Riddle 30b
, performed from the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records edition (9 November 2007).

References

{{reflist Riddles Old English literature Old English poetry