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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.

In this article, I argue that the alliterative poem, St. Erkenwald , is a Middle English innovation on Old English and Anglo-Latin parchment riddles. By examining St. Erkenwald in light of the parchment riddles by Anglo-Latin riddlers Tatwine and Eusebius, and riddles contained in The Exeter Book , as well as the description of an ancient book in Matthew Paris’ Gesta abbatum monasterii Sancti Albani , I show that the Erkenwald -poet reimagined the motif of the talking piece of parchment as an ancient pagan judge. The  Erkenwald -poet’s reimagining of the parchment riddle as an allegory of reading has perhaps been obscured by what I argue is an unnecessary emendation to the text.

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.

In early medieval England, the ringing of bells served a wide range of functions. This article argues that a detailed understanding of bells and their everyday use can help to explain the intricate narratives and elaborate language of three Latin and Old English riddles. The first, the late antique ‘Riddle 80’ by Symphosius, describes a dinner bell and the idle chatter of a drunken party. The second, Tatwine of Canterbury’s ‘Riddle 7’, presents a funeral bell hanging in a tower as a deposed emperor who is hung and beaten. The third, the well-known ‘Exeter Riddle 4’, presents an everyday monastic bell as if it were an obedient monk, and it casts their relationship as interdependent and symbiotic. The bell solution has been heavily disputed. However, when the riddle is read alongside the rich context of monastic culture, and with careful attention to linguistic detail, this solution is confirmed.

Focusing on Socrates and Oedipus, this article explores the role of imagery of legs and leg-associated activities in philosophical and dramatic representations of philosophers. Socrates's philosophizing begins with wandering, culminates in immobile standing, and tragically ends with his sitting with his legs planted in the ground. Oedipus's philosophizing involves tragic ignorance of his own legs: he has succeeded in solving the philosophical riddle about the legs of Man in general, yet fails to see his own feet and thereby to solve the riddle of his own identity.

Although the enigmas found in the seventh-century anonymous Latin collection known as the Bern riddles are highly interesting and dramatic, they have been relatively neglected by scholars. This essay explores the Bern riddles’ place among other early medieval Latin riddle collections. It first explores the question of where the Bern riddles might have been written; as others have noted, it appears that its author was familiar with Mediterranean plants and products, and was thus probably native to southern Europe. The essay then seeks to outline the author’s relationship to the late-classical riddler known as Symphosius and the Anglo-Latin poet and scholar Aldhelm. The essay finds that the Bern riddler was clearly influenced by and drew upon the riddles of Symphosius, but developed this source material in dynamic ways. Furthermore, although the evidence is ambiguous, phrasing and choice of subjects appears to suggest that the Bern riddler preceded and influenced Aldhelm. Overall, the essay attempts to demonstrate that the Bern riddles demonstrate a significant achievement in the development of the Latin riddle form, and are worthy of study in and of themselves.

The linkage of the Old English riddles of the \"Exeter Book\" to the Anglo-Latin enigmata of Aldhelm and others is examined. The language of wonder's use in both the Old English riddles and the Latin enigma collections is analyzed. The findings show a distinct aesthetic function for the \"Exeter Book\", while the enigmata are thoroughly involved in the transmission of sacred and classical lore.

Being the only text written entirely in Latin extant in the Exeter Book, Riddle 90 has eluded a plausible explanation of its exceedingly obscure clues and no satisfactory solution has been proposed for it yet. In this paper, I argue this is so because this composition was probably not a riddle in origin. Instead, what has traditionally been referred to as Riddle 90 should rather be seen as a school drill that probably seeped into the Exeter Book in the last stages of its compilation process or—more probably—its exemplar. A paleographical study of this text will evince that this poem was copied into the Exeter Book exemplar rather mechanically by a scribe who could not make much of its contents. Furthermore, an analysis of the rhetorical characteristics of Riddle 90 shows that the poet probably had in mind the literary patterns set by the Hisperic style, as observed in Aldhelm’s Carmen rhythmicum and The Rhyming Poem. Finally, I demonstrate that the formal aspects of Riddle 90 suggest that—in spite of being a modest Latin drill—this text could have been included into the Exeter Book because its stylistic features were consonant with the poetic modes cultivated by authors belonging to “Æthelwold’s school,” of which Wulfstan of Winchester was the leading representative.