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29 The Wanton Hand: Reading and Reaching into Grammars and Bodies in Old English Riddle 12 Sarah L. Higley HIS ESSAY is a study of the Old English word swife∂ as it is used in the much talked of Riddle 12.1 Although it is not a hapax legomenon, as it occurs five other times in the entire Anglo-Saxon corpus, its use here is a curious one, made all the more so by its rarity. In place of the ordinary usage of swife∂ (intransitive) “moves,” I propose that it mean something else in Riddle 12, something more akin to the meaning (transitive) that it developed in Chaucer’s day. This puts it in the realm of what C.S. Lewis might have called a “dangerous sense” (d.s.),2 since it can so easily bend to one’s desire to make it have this meaning, make it solve the problem of its difficult grammar, make it prove the salaciousness of its context, and the contemned activity of the woman who is the centerpiece of the riddle. In short, I want to make swife∂ me yield its probable, vulgar, and most “dangerous sense” of unveiled coitus, and to show that it may exhibit not only a double meaning in an obscene riddle but double valency — that is, in linguistic 1 I want to thank all the scholars who responded to the questions I raised about Riddle 12 in the summer of 1997 on electronic listservs ANSAX and MEDFEM — Paul Acker, Norman Hinton, Susan Granquist, Lorraine Stock, and the late Ted Irving, and especially Nina Rulon-Miller, my partner in riddling, who has also recently written on this text, and who has been so generous in sharing ideas to which I hope I will give good credit. 2 “The dominant sense of any word lies uppermost in our minds. Wherever we meet the word, our natural impulse will be to give it that sense. When this operation results in nonsense, of course, we see our mistake and try over again. But if it makes tolerable sense our tendency is to go merrily on. We are often deceived. In an old author the word may mean something different. I call such senses dangerous senses because they lure us into misreadings. In examining a word I shall often have to distinguish one of its meanings as its dangerous sense, and I shall symbolize this by writing the word (in italics) with the letters d.s. after it.” Studies in Words (Cambridge, 1960), p. 13. T Sarah L. Higley 30 terminology, an extra argument and transitive force. If the Riddles represent naked and clothed meaning (to invoke Ælfric’s familiar nacedan gerecednisse), I want to see, as I think the Exeter Book riddlers did, both word and woman revealed. The swiving woman may not be “naked before God,” but she is naked, one presumes, before the servants of God in a poem recorded and read by learned men. This essay, then, has two thrusts: it tackles the problems of both grammar and solution in Riddle 12, and also the fraught issues of hermeneutics and sexuality that inform our readings of it. It strives to locate the tension between critical desire and careful philology, a difficult task when the latter may not easily serve the former, especially given the rare words and double entendres. Before I begin an analysis of this poem from the Exeter Book, let me start by invoking a much later text, one that raises the question of contemplation, distraction, and desire. Walter Hilton’s fourteenth-century Scale of Perfection, dedicated to an unknown anchoress, is a study of right meditation of Christ’s divine body, and in Chapter 52 of Part I he begins to talk of a counter-image that will preoccupy the meditator and draw her away from her vision.3 It takes the form of a thing the author calls “nought,” or nothing, but it becomes clear that it has some kind of vile body that spouts limbs and rivers. Sarah Stanbury identifies the evil of the “murk ymage” with medieval biases against swarthy complexions , often given to the demons who appear in medieval illuminations as tormentors of the white-faced Christ.4 Although The Scale of Perfection post-dates The Exeter Book by several hundred years, I find its preoccupation with a mysterious dark idol, emblem of self and sinfulness, to be peculiarly resonant with the distracting, mysterious, and dark body of the wale, perhaps reflecting a...

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