Explore the vast range of titles available.

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.

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 best-known literary achievement of Anglo-Saxon England,Beowulfis a poem concerned with monsters and heroes, treasure and transience, feuds and fidelity. Composed sometime between 500 and 1000 C.E. and surviving in a single manuscript, it is at once immediately accessible and forever mysterious. And in Craig Williamson's splendid new version, this often translated work may well have found its most compelling modern English interpreter. Williamson'sBeowulfappears alongside his translations of many of the major works written by Anglo-Saxon poets, including the elegies \"The Wanderer\" and \"The Seafarer,\" the heroic \"Battle of Maldon,\" the visionary \"Dream of the Rood,\" the mysterious and heart-breaking \"Wulf and Eadwacer,\" and a generous sampling of the Exeter Book riddles. Accompanied by a foreword by noted medievalist Tom Shippey on Anglo-Saxon history, culture, and archaeology, and Williamson's introductions to the individual poems as well as his essay on translating Old English, the texts transport us back to the medieval scriptorium or ancient mead hall to share an exile's lament or herdsman's recounting of the story of the world's creation. From the riddling song of a bawdy onion that moves between kitchen and bedroom, to the thrilling account of Beowulf's battle with a treasure-hoarding dragon, the world becomes a place of rare wonder in Williamson's lines. Were his idiom not so modern, we might almost think the Anglo-Saxon poets had taken up the lyre again and begun to sing after a silence of a thousand years.

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.

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 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.

This article examines the productive difficulties with which the Exeter Book riddles generate a state of mind appropriate for theological meditation, by considering the reversed violence of Eucharistic remembering and the ludic pleasures of the enigmatic text. I examine closely Riddle 85, which has been unanimously solved as ‘fish and river’ on account of its clear debt to the twelfth Aenigma of Symphosius, and, having acknowledged the attractiveness and the limitations of the one other commonly suggested solution, ‘soul and body’, propose a new solution, ‘the housel inside the body’. This proposed solution shares with ‘soul and body’ the meditation upon the material encountering the immaterial, but it better accounts for the seeming interchangeability of the two parts of this riddle’s solution, by considering the mutual inhering of Christ and communicant in the Eucharist. I read Riddle 85 in the context of Ælfric’s writing on the Eucharist, and also consider the hyhtplega, or joyful play, by which Christ leaps in Christ II, and by which the would-be riddle-solver must contemplate simultaneously a multiplicity of solutions.

The Exeter Book Riddles provide insight into how early English medieval people felt about their place in the non-human world by giving voice to many non-human creatures. Riddle 26 depicts the creation of a manuscript from the perspective of a sheep becoming a page. A close reading of the riddle reveals that the poem is divided into two nearly identical sections, which are built around the contrast between the fundamental and material elements of book-making and the cultural and religious utility of a manuscript. The riddle begins with the killing of the animal at the hands of an unknown foe and then follows the speaking subject through its forced metamorphosis. The employment of a first-person narrator establishes an empathetic bond between the animal speaking voice and the human audience. However, near the middle of the poem, the tone changes dramatically as the emphasis turns from animal materialism to human spirituality. The closing lines insist on the beauty of the craft, the cultural significance of the book and the spiritual advantages derived from it. As a result, the interaction between the two sections appears to call into question humanity’s position in the book-making process, while simultaneously highlighting the paradoxes in book creation and manuscript culture.

The twentieth biennial meeting of the Society took as its general theme ‘Contributions’. Featured were five keynotes, fifty-five regular papers and four project reports. 152 persons registered for the conference.