"Beowulf" and Other Old English Poems

SELECTED EXETER BOOK RIDDLES

SELECTED EXETER BOOK RIDDLES There are over ninety Old English lyric riddles in the Exeter Book. Some, such as Riddle 81, “Fish and River,” are based on medieval Latin riddles, but most appear to be original. They may have been written by a single author or by several. Cynewulf, whose runic signature appears in two of the Exeter Book poems, was once thought to be the author of the riddles, but 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 riddles. 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. The use of riddles or of riddlic metaphors is an important rhetorical device in medieval dialogue poetry. It occurs in poems such as Alcuin’s eighth-century Latin “Dialogue with Pippin,” which poses riddlic questions and answers such as, “What is the moon?—the eye of night.” “What are the lips?—the door of the mouth.” “What is the wonder of a dead man walking?—an image in water” (noted in Turner, 3: 380 ff.). Riddlic dialogues also occur in the ninth- or tenth-century Old English poem, “Solomon and Saturn,” and in early Germanic stories like the Old Norse Vafthruthnismal, in which Odin and the giant Vafthruthnir engage in a riddle-like contest of wits. They also occur in the Icelandic Heidreks Saga, where the god Odin in the disguise of an old man, Gestumblindi, matches riddlic wits with his proud persecutor, King Heidrek. Riddlic dialogues like Alcuin’s almost certainly took place in the Anglo-Saxon monasteries and in 162 | EXETER BOOK RIDDLES the greater courts as part of the learning process. Whether the game was carried out in the vernacular, as “Solomon and Saturn” and the northern Germanic stories suggest, is not known, but it seems likely. In formal poetic terms, there are two kinds of riddles. In third-person descriptive riddles, the human speaker describes a wondrous creature he has seen or heard about. These riddles often begin with a formula, “I saw (heard about) a creature,” or “The creature is,” and end with “Say what I mean.” First-person persona riddles give voice to the non-human creature and often begin with “I am (was) a creature” and end with “Say who I am.” The tension between these two different kinds of riddles raises a question about the implied relationship between perception and being, or hermeneutics (how we make meaning) and ontology (how we define being). How we perceive the world, how we make meaning with language, helps to shape who we are. Our recognition of the other in the riddles helps us to enlarge both our sense of human perception and our understanding of alternate ways of being in the world. I summarize this process elsewhere: The Old English riddlers have meaning to peddle and part of the meaning lies in the game. The riddlers taunt and cajole, they admit and deny, they peddle false hopes and paradoxes, they lead the reader down dark roads with glints of light. And in the end they never confess except to flatter, “Say what I mean.” What they mean is the riddle-solver’s meaning. What they mean is that reality exists and is at the same time a mosaic of man’s perception. What they mean is that man’s measure of the world is in words, that perceptual categories are built on verbal foundations, and that by withholding the key to the categorical house (the entitling solution) the riddlers may force the riddle-solver to restructure his own perceptual blocks in order to gain entry to a metaphorical truth. In short the solver must imagine himself a door and open in. (Williamson 1977, 25) What’s most important is the power of the guessing game to expand the limits of our perception, to move beyond the ordinary modes or categories of thought, and to appreciate more acutely the otherness of the world— especially the natural world—around us. The riddles, however, also point to the limits of our ability to catch the real world by means of language. Barley, for example, argues that the riddlegame is “a complicated play on reality and appearance, linking the unlike, EXETER BOOK RIDDLES | 163 denying conventional...