Riddle

Riddles have been maligned as a feature of schoolyard play; an extended form of a groan-worthy pun; texts of disposable nature that evaporate once someone gives the correct solution. But that does not have to be the case. Enigmas can open up worlds obliquely, suggesting a reality at once palpable, recognizable, yet always elusive. They might succinctly fuse materiality with mobility, encouraging their audience to grapple with large questions even after finding the apparent solution, as in the pair of texts—one medieval, one modern—I discuss here, in which circularity and cyclicality emerge as metatextual concerns.

Exeter riddle 30a comes from a collection of ninety or so poems in Old English, which dazzle with their variety and depth of learning.¹ These are miniature forms, ranging from a few lines long to several pages at most, that present their readers with great challenges, asking us to examine issues such as the interdependence of human, animal, and thing; the artistic process; and the cycles of life and death. Like enigmas more generally, Exeter riddles draw on the world around us in order to estrange it vigorously. They do not let us move in one direction from being perplexed to enlightened. Far from letting us domesticate them with solutions that account for all the distracting clues, or an orthodox consolation where once there was alluring danger, Old English riddles continue to disturb and enchant long after our proposed interpretations. Much of their power lies in their particular type of compression, which makes them expandable and portable.

Riddle 30a consists of only nine lines, but appears twice in the manuscript; the other version comes after Riddle 59, is almost identical to Riddle 30a, and has the editorial designation 30b. It reads:

Ic eom legbysig,       lace mid winde,bewunden mid wuldre,       wedre gesomnad,fus forðweges,       fyre gebysgad,bearu blowende,       byrnende gled.Ful oft mec gesiþas       sendað æfter hondum,þæt mec weras ond wif       wlonce cyssað.Þonne ic mec onhæbbe,       ond hi onhnigaþ to me monige mid miltse,       þær ic monnum scealycan upcyme       eadignesse.

Or in Kevin Crossley-Holland's elegant translation:

I'm surrounded by flames and sport with the wind,I'm clothed in finery and the storm's great friend,ready to travel, but troubled by fire,a glade in full bloom and a burning flame;friends often pass me from hand to hand,and I'm kissed by ladies and courteous men.When I raise myself, many peoplebow before me; I bringtheir happiness to full maturity.²

This is wood in its many manifestations: a living tree, a ship, a log used for heating and fuel, a drinking cup, and finally a crucifix, its individual representation and the True Cross. From the nineteenth century, the polysemic word beam has served as a solution to Riddle 30a. Its meanings range metonymically from the organism ("tree") to material ("a timber"), from any object made of wood to Christ's Rood.³ The word survives in present-day English in two senses, which it also had in pre-Conquest England: beam of light and building beam, a four-letter marriage of utter immateriality and materiality.⁴ Wood seems to embody the very idea of materiality in the time of the Exeter riddles; timber so imbues the concept of building that a common Old English verb for "to construct" is timbr(i)an.⁵ It has been the truism of scholarship that while the Romans before them built in stone, the early medieval English preferred wood, and much of their architecture and artwork has not survived due to the fragility of the material. Yet plant life stands for matter tout court even in classical cultures. Aristotle calls matter hyle, which additionally signifies wood in ancient Greek, while the Latin materia covers "matter, stuff, materials" as well as "timber."⁶ Materia would make an apt choice if we decided to give the solution of Riddle 30a in Latin.⁷

The speaking beam fuses materiality with mobility. In one moment, it is eager to depart ("fus forðweges"), at another it fears disappearance by burning; in one moment, a tree is...