A Feast of Creatures: Anglo-Saxon Riddle-Songs

Introduction

INTRODUCTION P R O E M Across time the ox's skin and the dart Of once-wing from horn to page preserve The song-smith's hammer, fire, dinWho were the Anglo-Saxon riddlers Who locked in the dark mirror of metaphor A cultural eye, an ageless game? Children do this and dying menCreation sings in the cow's dead skin: Bound in another, all things begin. The Old English riddles are a metaphoric and metamorphic celebration of life in the eye of the Anglo-Saxon. Metaphoric because each riddlic creature takes on the guise of another: the nightingale is an evening poet, mead is a wrestler, the sword a celibate thane, the silver wine-cup a seductress. Metamorphic because in the natural flow all creatures shift shapes: the horn turns from twinned head-warrior of the wild aurochs to battle-singer or mead-belly-sometimes it swallowsthe blood of hawthorn and gives to quill and vellum page the gift of words. The book too has its own beginnings -it sings in riddle 24: Introduction 3 A life-thief stole my world-strength, Ripped off flesh and left me skin, Dipped me in water and drew me out, Stretched me bare in the tight sun; The hard blade, clean steel, cut, Scraped-fingers folded, shaped me. Now the bird's once wind-stiff joy Darts often to the horn's dark rim, Sucks wood-stain, steps back againWith a quick scratch of power, tracks Black on my body, points trails.' The metaphor of riddles mirrors metamorphosis: all things shift in the body of nature and the mind of man. But the flow, the form and movement, remains. As the mind shifts, it shapes meaning. When is an iceberg a witch-warrior? When it curses and slaughters ships. When is it a great mother? When transformed and lifted, it rains down. There is a primitive participation and poetic synchronicity in this. Man charts the world and the world sings in images his uncharted spirit. The riddles are primitive flower and lyric seed. T o us they offer a world in which there is an eye (I) in every other, a charged world where as Walt Whitman says, there is "God in every object."2 If we no longer see the tree in the table or sense the sinuous vine in the wine's work or quicken in the bow of the nightingale's song, this may be a world we need. O R I G I N S The riddles rest in a thousand-year-old vellum manuscript known as the Exeter Book which resides in Exeter Cathedral Library (skin songs in a holy 1.All translations of Old English poetry are my own. The original texts for riddles may be found in my text edition, The Old English Riddles of the ExeterBook (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977); for nonriddlic poems, in The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records (hereafter ASPR), ed. George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, 6 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931-53). Occasionally I have consulted other editions in making my translations from ASPR. 2. Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself," stanza 148,Leaves of Grass, ed. Harold W . Blodgett and Sculley Bradley (New York: W. W . Norton and Co., 1973), p. 86. A Feast of Creatures 4 house). The scribal hand of the book dates from the late tenth century. Leofric, first Bishop of Exeter, donated the "great English book with variously wrought songs"3 to the cathedral library in the eleventh century. The riddles were probably first written down in the late seventh or eighth centuries-r even in the ninth. How far back into oral tradition some of them go remains an open question. Wlio first chanted or wrote the riddles we may never know. Cynewulf, whose runic signature appears in two of the Exeter Book poems, was once thought to be author of the riddles; on stylistic grounds this now seems unlikely. Aldhelm of Malmesbury, the seventh-century English churchman who wrote one hundred Latin riddles, may have written some of the Old English riddle-songs. His love of vernacular poetry was legendary. He is said by William of Malmesbury to have charmed Anglo-Saxons into church by chanting Old English songs from a wayside bridge.4 Aldhelm sent his Latin riddles and a treatise on verse to King Aldfrith of Northumbria, and the good king (who...