Exeter Book Riddle 51 (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 refer ...

) is one of the Old English

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 requir ...

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 Engli ...

. Its solution is 'quill pen and three fingers', 'whose figurative "journey" leaves a dark track of letters and words on the page' and it stands accordingly as an important literary example of the international

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 requi ...

type, the

Writing-riddle The writing-riddle is an international riddle type, attested across Europe and Asia. Its most basic form was defined by Antti Aarne as 'white field, black seeds', where the field is a page and the seeds are letters. However, this form admits of v ...

, whose most basic form is 'white field, black seeds'. In the reading of Helen Price, the riddle suggests that 'writing is a journey, but it is not one of a human being alone. The riddle is selfconsciously aware of the connected nature of human, tool, and animal'.Helen Price, �
Human and NonHuman in Anglo-Saxon and British Postwar Poetry: Reshaping Literary Ecology
�� (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Leeds, 2014), p. 127.

Text

Studies

* Lees, Clare A. 2010. ‘Basil Bunting, Briggflatts, Lindisfarne, and Anglo-Saxon Interlace’, in ''Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination'', ed. by David Clark and Nicholas Perkins, Medievalism, 1 (Cambridge: Brewer), pp. 111–28.

Recordings

* Michael D. C. Drout,
Riddle 51
, performed from the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records edition (29 October 2007).

References

Riddles Old English literature Old English poetry {{poem-stub