Uncommon Riddlers

Before the Norman conquest of Britain in 1066, a magical language was spoken by the heritors of Stonehenge. This was Anglo-Saxon, the Germanic precursor to the English we speak today. Imagine a roaring fire where bards gathered to regale young and old alike with cunning riddles composed of kennings (two-word, hyphenated phrases describing a being or object). Written language was for the clergy and nobility, but these riddles were for everyone. Elaborated and expanded by bardic memories, known to common folk, the riddles featured everyday objects from home, nature, and the Anglo-Saxons’ seafaring lives, and in many tellings and retellings, anchors, rakes, ovens, and onions became wizardly and monstrous, otherworldly and animate, holy and profane.

The Anglo-Saxon riddle-poems in the Exeter Book were bequeathed to Exeter Cathedral by Bishop Leofric in 1072 and were most likely collected and written down by monks. In this monastic tradition, Bertha Rogers has labored some twelve years to authentically translate and exquisitely illuminate the riddle poems in sonorous form and tone. Riddling contests were common in their day, and Rogers steps up with the best of the bards in her English translation; she also masterfully translated the Anglo-Saxon masterpiece Beowulf. It takes a brave translator to provide the original text alongside her translation, and Uncommon Creatures is fully bilingual. The translations have a timeless quality, appropriate to any century.

Rogers first translated Beowulf when Tom Farrington (a poet and theater director in Manhattan) encouraged her to take a shot at it for a performance at the Centerfold Coffeehouse on the Upper West Side. She took Farrington up on his idea and translated the first part (up to Grendel’s and his mother’s deaths) and produced it in 1988 at the Centerfold. Rogers moved to the Catskills in 1989. In 1992, Rogers and her husband founded Bright Hill Press, and she continued working on the rest of her translation of Beowulf. In 1994, they decided to do an outdoor production of Beowulf in the Stone Circle on the mountain behind their house; Tom Farrington served as advisor, and they cast Roger’s edited manuscript/play with New York City cast who rehearsed in the City until the last week before production, when they all came up, stayed in the Rogers’s house, and rehearsed and performed the complete play in that Stone Circle with a local musician, torches, and strange instruments, including an Aeolian harp. It was a sensation. That was enough for Rogers for a while, but soon she found she was missing the Anglo-Saxon, and she decided to take on the riddles from the Exeter Book. This time, she felt it was important to keep the rhythm, even the number of syllables in lines, and the caesuras, upping her game. As the current opus demonstrates, this worked particularly well for her, but she spent several years on that translation as a result, too, partly because her husband was quite ill during the last six years of his life. He died in 2016, and she finally got back to the translations, determining to finish them, which she did, in 2018. She had a publisher, but he wanted to publish only her translations; and Rogers felt that the original Anglo-Saxon was crucial to the book. Also, being a visual artist, Rogers wanted to create illuminations for the book. This was to be her opus (although she is planning another Anglo-Saxon translation, as yet to be named). Rogers wanted to do it exactly the way she wanted, and did.

Rogers clearly loves the sound of the Anglo-Saxon and its rhythm. When she was working on Beowulf and still living in the City, she listened to Kemp Malone’s Caedmon recording of Beowulf in the original Anglo-Saxon. She believes that that rhythm is vitally important to translating the language, and she has succeeded in that regard. As a translator...