Riddle 36. Young Ox or Bull Calf. This is one of three Ox riddles (see Riddles 10 and 70) that share motifs with Latin riddles by Aldhelm and Eusebius. This riddle, with its colloquial language, its prescient country bystander chiming in with a riddle-within-the-riddle, and its natural celebration of Bess and boy, seems wrought with the tone and humor of a country poet.
Riddle 37. Uncertain. Suggested solutions include Dream, Language, Speech, Time, Death, Fate, Faith, Moon, Cloud, Comet, and Day. There is no general agreement about the creature in this riddle, despite the riddler’s insistence that writings reveal its plain presence among men. We should know it—it seeks each living person, moves everywhere in the wide world, and carries comfort to the children of middle-earth. Yet its power passes knowing. No wonder—it has no hands, feet, mouth, mind, or soul. Yet it lives. It is the poorest of creatures, yet it reaps glory. It is marvelously difficult to catch with words, yet everything said about it is true.
Riddle 38. Creation, Nature. This riddle is based on a long Latin original by the seventh-century English churchman Aldhelm, who composed a “century” or set of one hundred Latin riddles. The OE riddler expanded and reshaped portions of the Latin to make a leaner style. The riddle celebrates what the Anglo-Saxons called forð-gesceaft or “creation-bodying-forth,” the divine and discernible spirit infused in all things. The reference to the mythical pernex in line 47 is a mistranslation of the Latin plus pernix aquilis, “swifter than the eagle.”
Riddle 39. Water. This riddle fragment gives only general clues, but a similar water-creature is described in Riddle 80 as the “mother of any well-known creatures” whose “lineage sings the spawn of creation.” Other suggested solutions are Nature, Creation (as part of the previous riddle), Earth, Fire, and Wisdom.
Riddle 40. Cock and Hen. Bedroom carousers and barnyard hands may know from experience these bawdy birds. Bookworms will have to unravel the runic clues of the central lines, which rearranged spell OE hana (cock) and hæn (hen). The heart of the riddle is love’s stronghold unlocked with a literate or libidinous key. Scholars will take sublimated pleasure in discovering the solution. Common carousers will simply enjoy the low-down humor in the riddle.
Riddle 41. Soul and Body. The lordly guest of great lineage is the soul; its servant and brother, the body. Earth is mother and sister to both: mother because man was shaped from clay; sister because earth, soul, and body were all created by God the Father. The body must serve the soul in liege-lord fashion, but each must love and care for the other as a brother because finally they are bound in judgment. United again on Judgment Day, they will find bliss in heaven or torment in hell. There are three other Soul and Body poems—one in the Exeter Book, one in the Vercelli Book, and one in the Worcester Fragments (see “Additional Poems”).
Riddle 42. Key. This is the first of two key riddles in the Exeter Book; the other, less bawdy rendering is Riddle 87. The key itself may dangle on a belt beneath the Anglo-Saxon tunic; its lascivious double is also hung boldly beneath and below. The small miracle may open love’s lock as it slips snugly into the “hole it has long come to fill.” The only other proposed solution is Dagger-Sheath.
Riddle 43. Bread Dough. For polite company the answer to this riddle is bread dough—though lustier spirits may find the phallic solution barely concealed. As in other bawdy double-entendre riddles, the poet is at pains to tease us with both solutions. In playful fashion the riddle is also an elaborate and punningly obscene etymological joke, since the Old English word for “lord,” hlaford, comes from hlaf-weard, “guardian of the loaf,” and the word for “lady,” hlæfdige, comes from hlaf-dige, “kneader of the dough.” The lady in question is presumably making more than bread.
Riddle 44. Lot and His Family. This riddle is based on the confusion of kinship terms arising from Lot’s siring sons with his own daughters, as told in Genesis 19 and in other medieval sources. Lot’s wives are also his daughters; his sons are their sons and also his grandsons. Mothers and sons together, since they are all Lot’s children, are also brothers and sisters. This makes each son paradoxically both uncle and nephew of the other. Midrash tradition has it that this impossible riddle was the second query proposed by the Queen of Sheba to Solomon to test his wisdom.
Riddle 45. Bookmoth, Bookworm, Maggot, and Psalter. The central idea here is based on a fifth-century Latin riddle by Symphosius. The thief who swallows songs is a bookworm. The moth lays its eggs in the spine of a manuscript made of cowhide. The larvae hatch and feed on the vellum leaves. To the worm, Beowulf or the Bible is just like beef jerky. The riddler pokes mock-heroic fun at the worm, a midnight marauder who like a pedant devours the substance without the spirit. The word wyrm in Old English can mean “worm, moth, bug, dragon”—in short, everything that treats man as a material body and wants to devour him. There is a wordplay in the riddle between cwide, “sayings,” and cwidu, “cud” (see Robinson, 1975, on this and other examples of ambiguity and wordplay in the riddle). The worm treats our songs and sayings like so much lunch. But the riddler reverses this by turning the moth’s munching into a rumination of song, and in so doing reclaims what was lost in the original word-hoard of the mind and memory.
Riddle 46. Paten or Chalice. This creature, crafted of gold, whose inscription sings silently to the supplicant, must be one of the sacred vessels of the Mass. The circle or hring, which can refer to anything round in OE, holds its own sacred riddle, the blood-wine or embodied host of Christ. It sings the supplicant’s plea, urging man to partake of the deeper mystery of the Mass. Riddle 57 is another chalice riddle.
Riddle 47. Uncertain. What are the treasures “dearer than gold,” swallowed by the creature and sought by man each day to sustain him? Probably bread or books. Oven and Bookcase are thus the two likeliest solutions. Other suggestions include Mill, Falcon-Cage, and Pen and Ink. If the daily sustenance is metaphorical (wisdom), the bookcase shelves it; if literal (food or bread), the oven bakes it. The race of shapers may be scribes or cooks.
Riddle 48. Fire. This warrior has dumb parents, flint and steel. Scourge and protector, helpmate and hearth-devil, it serves well when ruled with a firm hand and hard mind. Without discipline and care, it grows wild and brings fools a grim reward. Restrained, it serves; unrestrained, it destroys.
Riddle 49. Quill-Pen and Fingers. The four strange creatures on the gold-adorned road are the quill-pen and thumb and two fingers that hold the pen. The brash bird, reduced to a feather, darts from inkwell to the gilded vellum road and back again. The warrior who pushes them on is the writer. The OE feþer can refer to both the bird and the quill-pen that facilitates the playful movement in the riddle. The motifs in the riddle are echoed in a number of medieval Latin riddles.
Riddle 50. Flail. The two hard captives bound together as one punishing creature, wielded by a Welshwoman and slave, are probably the handle and swipple of a threshing flail. Other suggested solutions include Well Buckets, Yoke of Oxen, and Broom.
Riddle 51. Battering Ram is the most likely solution, though Gallows Tree/Cross, and Spear have also been suggested. OE ram(m) occurs in the glosses and in Alfred’s translation of Gregory’s Pastoral Care as either a war tool or the animal (Latin aries may also be either), so presumably the Anglo-Saxons knew of the weapon—though without castles and fortifications, they would not have used it. The solution was probably based on literary and iconographic sources. The Gallows Tree proposal has interesting possibilities, but it is hard to see how it would have dark trim or trappings in its front or how it might batter its way through some resistance with its head.
Riddle 52. Butter-Churn. Like the earlier sexual double-entendre “bread” and “onion” riddles (23 and 43), this one also has ostensibly to do with food. The male servant thrusts his plunger into the female churn—together they make the baby, butter. The riddle opens with a burst of machismo, slightly surreal in its ravishing treatment of the passive woman in the corner. The man has the action—he steps, lifts, thrusts (his “something” is m
ock modesty), and works his will. Yet the paradox of sexuality here is that as man pumps, his power wanes. The dichotomy between active and passive, male and female, man and churn, disappears in a moment of lyric frenzy—“Both swayed and shook.” The narrative voice swings over to the feminine: the man is a servant, only sometimes useful, and too often tired before the work’s end. The woman’s power is in the making: she bears the butter.
Riddle 53. Weapon-Rack. This riddle presents a number of challenges and has elicited a wide variety of solutions, including Sword-Rack, (Ornamented) Sword-Box, Mead-Barrel and Drinking Bowl, Shield, Scabbard, Gallows, Cross, and Harp. The most likely solution is that of Niles, who argues that the creature is “a weapon-rack or (possibly) a cart used to store and transport military equipment,” including swords (in the shape of a cross), spears, and also mail-coats; he notes that “when hung with one or more byrnies, this structure bore a resemblance to a gallows” (2006, 83–84). This solution satisfies most, but not all, of the details in the riddle. The four woods remain something of a mystery since it is unlikely that four different woods would be used in the construction of such an object. The cross-gallows here is called a “wolfshead-tree” because an outlaw was sometimes called a “wolf” and could be hunted and hung from a wooden gallows as Christ was from the cross.
Riddle 54. Web and Loom in some form (Tapestry and Loom, Web and Weaver’s Loom) is accepted by most editors. Less likely suggestions are Turning-Lathe and Flail. The loom has vertical warp-threads suspended from a horizontal beam. The threads are divided into alternate rows by a parting plank and kept taut by loom weights attached to their ends. This forms an opening or shed through which the shuttle moves, carrying the weft-thread. After the shuttle glides through the loom, the weft is struck tight by a toothed batten, the “small spears” of line 4. In the process of weaving, one of the alternate rows of weighted warp-threads dances up and down (pulled by a leash-rod) so that each pass of the shuttle moves on alternate sides of its strands. Thus the web in the riddle has a fixed and a furiously swinging foot. The bright tree may be either the loom with its colorful web or a distaff of flax or wool nearby. The loom’s leaving, presumably a tapestry, is borne to the high hall of heroes.
Riddle 55. Swallows. Most of the suggested solutions to this riddle are birds, including Starlings, Swifts, Jackdaws, Crows, and House Martins. Non-aviary solutions include Gnats, Flies, Bees, Hailstones, Raindrops, Storm Clouds, Musical Notes, Letters, Damned Souls, and Demons. The small dark-coated, song-bright wind-riders who seem equally at home in the high wooded cliffs and the halls of men and who travel together in a troop are most likely swallows—though the requirement that the birds name themselves (with their cry?) would fit the crow or jackdaw more aptly.
Riddle 56. Well Sweep. This is a device for drawing water from a well. The sweep is a long pole attached to an upright that serves as its fulcrum. The longer, lighter end of the sweep is connected to another pole or rope that lowers and raises the bucket in the well. The shorter end of the sweep may be weighted to help in raising the bucket. The creature has three runes in its name, beginning with Rad (the R-rune). This has long puzzled critics, but Niles (2006, 91) has solved this puzzle by reading the runic clue as R-ROD, where the initial rune is read with its name, Rad. An OE Rad-rod is a “riding-rod” or “sweeping pole.” When spelled with runes in this way, there are only three different runes since the R is doubled.
Riddle 57. Chalice. This riddle celebrates the chalice. Here the sacred “ring” (an Old English hring can be something circular) is passed to the communicants who celebrate the deep mystery of the mass. The circle of gold “speaks” of Christ in two ways: it offers the sacred blood-wine of the Savior, and its body like Christ’s is scored with wounds, probably icons and inscriptions. Like the cross in The Dream of the Rood, the chalice is both glorious token and wounded object. As it passes, “twisting, turning in the hands / Of proud men,” its celebrants seem to reflect the torturers at the foot of the cross.
Riddle 28b. Tree or Wood. This is the second, only slightly different version of this riddle. See the headnote to Riddle 28a.
Riddle 58. Reed (Reed-Pipe, Reed-Pen). This riddle has been thought by some to be a Rune-Stave and by others a Reed-Pen or Reed-Pipe (Flute), but Niles (2006, 130–32) argues convincingly that the creature is OE hreod, which can be all things reedy—a reed in the water, a reed-pipe or flute, and a reed-pen. This same range of meanings holds true for the Latin harundo, which is also the subject of a riddle by Symphosius. Other proposed solutions include Kelp-Weed, Cross, and Letter-Beam.
Riddle 59. Shirt or Helmet. This is another bawdy riddle. The overt answer is something a man sticks his hairy head through, and this could be either a shirt (or mail-shirt) or helmet—it makes little difference to the wonderful off-color play of the riddle. The covert solution is hardly in question. Other suggestions solutions are Kirtle and Hood.
Riddle 60. Auger (Gimlet, Boring Tool). This is another bawdy riddle about a boring tool that heats up as it bores into the body of wood. Other suggestions include Burning Arrow, Poker or Fire-Rod, Oven-Rake, and Tool for Tapping a Smelting Oven. The reference to the “southern thruster” or “southern man” in the riddle remains obscure. It might be someone who lives in the south (a Welsh slave? a continental craftsman?). It might also indicate the direction of the thrust, similar to a “southern spear” in The Battle of Maldon, with obvious bawdy implications here.
Riddle 61. Beaker. At this point in the manuscript, the text begins to be obliterated in places from the long diagonal burn that resulted from someone placing something like a hot poker or fiery brand on the back of it. The creature of this riddle fragment is a drinking vessel, probably a glass beaker. Continental and Anglo-Saxon glass cups, jars, and beakers are a common find in early English archaeological sites. The riddle shares motifs with Aldhelm’s Calix Vitreus (Glass Beaker) riddle. Other solutions include Flute, Flask, and Can.
Riddle 62. Ship. This riddle is structured in ways similar to Riddle 17. Both are built on the common OE kenning of the ship as a sea-horse. Here the runes (represented by bold capitals in the translation) indicate the first two letters of the words they stand for: WIcg (Horse), BEorn (Man), HAfoc (Hawk), ÞEgn (Hero), FÆlca (Falcon), and EASPor (Sea-Track). The sea-horse is a ship with birdlike sails, carrying a man or hero over the sea-track (for various interpretations of the runes, see Williamson, 1977, 325–30). Other less likely solutions include Falconry, Writing, Hunting, and Snake-Eating Bird. This riddle presents such difficulty that someone has scratched in dry-point runes in the margin BUNRÞ (though the exact runes are debated), which may indicate OE Beo unreþe! (Don’t be cruel!).
Riddle 63. Onion. This is the plain onion riddle; for the bawdy version, see Riddle 23. The “biter bitten” motif is also found in the Latin riddle of Symphosius. This is one of many OE riddles in which a creature of nature is wounded or destroyed by man only to find a new power to overcome man. Other suggested solutions are Leek and Chive.
Riddle 64. Creation or Nature. This riddle is a shortened version of Riddle 38. Some scholars, citing the riddle’s emphasis on the divine power at work in nature, prefer the solution God or God in Creation. The flight at the end of the poem over the angels’ homeland may reflect Christ’s Ascension in Christ II: The Ascension in the Exeter Book (lines 229 ff. in my translation). Another proposed solution is Water.
Riddle 65. Bible. This fragment identifies a creature that offers charmed words of wisdom to mankind and is decorated with gold and silver. It seems to be a religious book of some kind, probably a Bible.
Riddle 66. Iceberg. Lines 1–2 of this riddle and line 3 appear in the manuscript to be two separate riddles, but the scribe in a number of places seems to have separated riddles in two or joined separate riddles together. Most editors now treat these lines as one riddle. The opening lines echo the opening lines of Riddle 31, the other iceberg riddle. The wave-walker, water turned to bone, is surely an iceberg, though other solutions
have been offered, for either the two-or three-line riddle. These include Ice, Frozen Pond, Icicle, Winter, Petrified Wood, Running Water, and Christ Walking on Water.
Riddle 67. Lyre or Harp. Riddles 67 and 68 were once thought to be one riddle (the two together solved as Shepherd’s Pipe, Rye Flute, Harp, Hurdy-Gurdy, and Shuttle), but a missing folio is now thought to separate the two riddles. The round-necked chanteuse of this riddle who “sings through her sides” is probably an Anglo-Saxon harp or lyre similar to the ones discovered at Sutton Hoo and Snape. Other suggested solutions for the single riddle are Church Bell and Nose.
Riddle 68. Lighthouse? Candle? There is barely enough descriptive evidence in this riddle fragment to hazard a guess as to the solution. Both a lighthouse and a candle would burn brightly. A lighthouse would stand be wege (by the road or sea), but the road would have to be metaphorical for the candle (a shelf-road or a manuscript-road?).
Riddle 69. Sword. This steep-cheeked creature wrapped in gold and garnet is, like the creature of Riddle 18, a sword. It combines the stark beauty of an heirloom with the stinging strength of a slayer. The plain of bright flowers in line 3 may be the field from which the ore is mined or the radiant iron above the anvil (sparked by the smith’s blows) from which the blade is forged. The ring in line 9 is a swordring or ring-knob used on Anglo-Saxon hilts to symbolize the warrior’s liege-lord relationship. Other suggestions for this riddle include Dagger, Iron Helmet, Iron Shield, and Cupping Glass.
Riddle 70. Ox. This is the last of the three Ox riddles in the Exeter Book (see also Riddles 10 and 36) that share certain motifs with similar Latin riddles. The stripling ox is here drawn from the pleasure of its mother’s four fountains (leaving the herdsman to pull in its place for milk) and yoked to the hard life of the plow. Other solutions include Axle and Wheels and Slave.
The Complete Old English Poems Page 126