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Perhaps the most enigmatic cultural artifacts that survive from the Anglo-Saxon period are the Old English riddle poems that were preserved in the tenth century Exeter Book manuscript. Clever, challenging, and notoriously obscure, the riddles have fascinated readers for centuries and provided crucial insight into the period. InSay What I Am Called, Dieter Bitterli takes a fresh look at the riddles by examining them in the context of earlier Anglo-Latin riddles. Bitterli argues that there is a vigorous common tradition between Anglo-Latin and Old English riddles and details how the contents of the Exeter Book emulate and reassess their Latin predecessors while also expanding their literary and formal conventions. The book also considers the ways in which convention and content relate to writing in a vernacular language. A rich and illuminating work that is as intriguing as the riddles themselves,Say What I Am Calledis a rewarding study of some of the most interesting works from the Anglo-Saxon period.

This book discusses the considerable influence exerted by Isidore's Etymologiae on the compilation of early medieval enigmata. Either in the form of thematic clusters or pairs, Isidorean encyclopedic patterns are observed not only in major Latin riddle collections in verse but can also be detected in the two vernacular assemblages contained in the Exeter Book. As with encyclopedias, the topic-centered arrangement of riddles was pursued by compilers as a strategy intended to optimize the didactic and instructional possibilities inherent in these texts and favor the readers' assimilation of their contents. This book thus provides a thoroughgoing investigation of medieval riddling, with special attention to the Exeter Book Riddles, demonstrating that this genre constituted an important part of the school curriculum of the early Middle Ages.

The vibrant and enigmatic Exeter Riddles (ca. 960–980) are among the most compelling texts in the field of medieval studies, in part because they lack textually supplied solutions. Indeed, these ninety-five Old English riddles have become so popular that they have even been featured on posters for the London Underground and have inspired a sculpture in downtown Exeter. Modern scholars have responded enthusiastically to the challenge of solving the Riddles, but have generally examined them individually. Few have considered the collection as a whole or in a broader context. In this book, Patrick Murphy takes an innovative approach, arguing that in order to understand the Riddles more fully, we must step back from the individual puzzles and consider the group in light of the textual and oral traditions from which they emerged. He offers fresh insights into the nature of the Exeter Riddles' complexity, their intellectual foundations, and their lively use of metaphor.

InA Feast of Creatures, Craig Williamson recasts nearly one hundred Old English riddles of the Exeter Book into a modern verse mode that yokes the cadences of Aelfric with the sprung rhythm of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Like the early English riddlers before him, Williamson gives voice to the nightingale, plow, ox, phallic onion, and storm-wind. In lean and taut language he offers us mead disguised as a mighty wrestler, the sword as a celibate thane, the silver wine-cup as a seductress, the horn transformed from head-warrior to ink-belly or battle-singer. In his notes and commentary he gives us possible and probable solutions, sources, and analogues, a shrewd sense of literary play, and traces the literary and cultural contexts in which each riddle may be viewed. In his introduction, Williamson traces for us the history of riddles and riddle scholarship.

No detailed description available for \"Unriddling the Exeter Riddles\".

A sequence of Old English riddles from the Exeter Book allow an implement to speak. This article focuses on one example, Riddle 5, generally solved as either a shield or a cutting board, to show how each interpretation gives voice not just to an inanimate object but also to a non-elite member of early medieval English society—either a foot-soldier or a kitchen hand. The two solutions come together because the two answers are captured in a single Old English word—“bord”—and also because the two interpretations resonate in parallel ways, creating sympathy for down-trodden members of society who rarely get so much attention in the surviving poetic record. This article argues that Old English riddles provide an enduring legacy of social critique crafted through humor.

The vibrant and enigmatic Exeter Riddles (ca. 960-980) are among the most compelling texts in the field of medieval studies, in part because they lack textually supplied solutions. Indeed, these ninety-five Old English riddles have become so popular that they have even been featured on posters for the London Underground and have inspired a sculpture in downtown Exeter. Modern scholars have responded enthusiastically to the challenge of solving the Riddles, but have generally examined them individually. Few have considered the collection as a whole or in a broader context. In this book, Patrick Murphy takes an innovative approach, arguing that in order to understand the Riddles more fully, we must step back from the individual puzzles and consider the group in light of the textual and oral traditions from which they emerged. He offers fresh insights into the nature of the Exeter Riddles' complexity, their intellectual foundations, and their lively use of metaphor.

The Exeter Book Riddles include four items in Old English consisting of no more than a single verse or line (Krapp/Dobbie nos. 69, 75, 76, and 79). Except for Riddle 75, whose solution is revealed by the accompanying runic letters in the manuscript, the single-liners offer little to the modern reader attempting to solve them. As a consequence, past commentators have taken them to be no more than fragments or abandoned beginnings of longer poems left incomplete by the copyist of the Exeter Book. Yet all four one-liners are meticulously set apart from the surrounding text on the page by both an opening initial and a closing punctuation mark, suggesting that the seemingly abortive items are, in fact, precisely what the anonymous Anglo-Saxon scribe took them to be, namely discrete short riddles. Read in the context of both the Exeter collection and the wider Anglo-Saxon riddle tradition, the four one-liners indeed lose much of their obscurity, and while some of them can be solved, others at least seem to suggest a possible answer. Instead of fragments or aborted lines, the four single-liners in the Exeter Book are simply short riddles—puzzling and tantalising, but nevertheless complete.