A Selection of Riddles

Three Exeter Book riddles are printed in Introduction to Old English as Minitexts I and L; the six offered below, like the Minitexts, are especially suitable for those beginning to read poetry.

Riddles were popular in both Anglo-Saxon England and Viking-age Scandinavia. An extensive collection of them is embedded in the Norse Saga of Heiðrek the Wise, and wisdom poems in both Old English and Norse sometimes present their lore in riddle form. The seventh- and eighth-century Anglo-Saxon churchmen Aldhelm, Boniface, Hwætberht and Tatwine all wrote sequences of Latin riddles (those by Aldhelm are especially fine), and an extensive collection of riddles in Old English verse is preserved in the Exeter Book, some of these translated from riddles by Aldhelm and others.

Several conventions of the riddle are on display here and in the Minitexts printed in Introduction to Old English. In A, B, D and E (and Minitext I) the objects themselves speak, challenging the listener to identify them. Misleading metaphors and baffling paradoxes are routine: the speaker in A appears to be a warrior, but if he gets wounded no one bothers to heal him; battle imagery also dominates C, and yet the answer is “Moon and Sun”; F presents a long list of people present at a feast, yet ends with a statement that there are really only five. Minitext L presents two “double entendre” riddles, in which a naughty, wrong-yet-right answer (in both cases “penis”) conceals a right-yet-dull answer (“key” and “dough”). E is presented almost entirely in negatives, ending in a paradox: it was not made as a garment is made, yet it is a garment. While most Latin riddles of the period are preserved with their answers, no answers accompany the Exeter Book riddles, and many scholars have found it a pleasurable occupation to puzzle out the solutions to the more obscure ones.

It should be noted that E (Mail-coat) is a translation of Aldhelm’s Riddle 33 (see Lapidge and Rosier 1985, p. 76). A ninth-century Northumbrian version of this riddle, similar to the Exeter Book version but with several substantive differences, also exists; the text printed here agrees substantively with the earlier version (see Textual Notes for further details).

These texts have been silently normalized, eccentric spellings removed. For a good scholarly edition, see Williamson 1977, nos. 3, 6, 27, 28, 33, 44.