Exeter Book Riddle 95: 'The Sun', a New Solution

Elusive and fraught with textual difficulties, Riddle 95, the ‘last’ of the Old English verse riddles preserved in the tenth-century Exeter Book, has long baffled modern readers as one of a handful of thorny items in the collection that have so far defied solution. ‘Book’ is the answer that has found most acceptance with critics in the past, yet the speaking subject of Riddle 95 is unlike anything described in those items of the collection that actually deal with writing and the tools of the monastic scriptorium. Rather, the linguistic and thematic parallels between Riddle 95 on the one hand, and the cosmological riddles and poems in the Exeter Book on the other, strongly suggest that the subject of Riddle 95 is the sun, a frequent topic of early medieval enigmatography. The poem obliquely relates how the rising sun installs itself in the sky to shed its welcome light upon the earth before it sets and vanishes from sight, completing its daily orbit along unknown paths. The main clues helping to secure the solution ‘sun’ are based upon what was known in Anglo-Saxon England about the solar course and the planetary motions, especially from the astronomical writings of Isidore of Seville and Bede. Further evidence is provided by several analogues in the Anglo-Latin riddle tradition, including the Enigmata of Aldhelm and his followers

Exeter book riddle 15: Some points for the porcupine

The subject of Riddle 15 of the Exeter Book is an animal that lives with its cubs in a burrow where it is hunted by an aggressive intruder. The poem describes how the family escapes through the tunnels of the burrow and how the mother reaches the open; there, she turns on her enemy to strike him with her ‘war-darts’. The proposed solutions to the riddle are usually either ‘badger’ or ‘fox’, whereas the alternative, ‘porcupine’, which was first suggested more than a century ago, has traditionally been rejected on the grounds that the porcupine is not an indigenous species in England. However, there are several strong arguments in favour of the porcupine. In the Latin tradition, the porcupine occurs not only in the zoological writings of Pliny the Elder and Solinus, but also in the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, which already provided the Anglo-Latin enigmatists (Aldhelm, Tatwine and Eusebius) with both facts and legends about beasts. Among these is the old belief that the porcupine is able to shoot out its long, sharp quills, especially at dogs pursuing it – just like the animal in Riddle 15. Other details and clues, too, tally with the characteristics of the porcupine, which was said to resemble the hedgehog and, therefore, was known to the Anglo-Saxons as se mara igil (‘the larger hedgehog’). This paper explores the imaginative language and rhetoric of Riddle 15 and discusses the solutions hitherto proposed in the light of Latin animal riddling and animal lore, both of which informed the Old English riddles of the Exeter Book. In this context, the ‘porcupine’ – though exotic and long refuted – emerges as the most likely solution to Riddle

Alkuin von York und die angelsächsische Rätseldichtung

Alcuin of York (d. 804) is mostly remembered as the eminent Anglo-Saxon scholar and leading architect of the Carolingian Renaissance. To his contemporaries and friends at Charlemagne’s court in Aachen, however, Alcuin was first and foremost a writer and poet, whose elegant verse gained him the nickname of ‘Flaccus’. Alcuin’s surviving literary oeuvre indeed covers a wide range of forms and genres, and it comes as no surprise that he also composed a number of riddles, both in verse and prose, following in the footsteps of his compatriots and predecessors in the genre, Aldhelm of Malmesbury (d. 709/10), Tatwine (d. 734), Eusebius (8th c.), and Boniface (d. 754). Compared to the latter’s dazzling collections of poetic Enigmata, Alcuin’s occasional verse riddles appear more limited, both in number and scope. Yet a fuller picture of Alcuin’s contribution to the genre can be gleaned from two of his didactic prose works, which place their author squarely within the Anglo-Saxon riddle tradition: the short Disputatio Pippini cum Albino, a witty dialogue composed for one of Charlemagne’s sons, and the related Propositiones ad acuendos iuvenes, a collection of mathematical problems ‘to Sharpen the Young’, now generally attributed to Alcuin. The Disputatio indeed contains a series of pithy riddle-questions, some of which can be shown to belong to the stock of early medieval enigmatography, going back as far as the late Roman poet Symphosius (4th/5th c. AD), whose century of hexametrical tristichs was already known to Aldhelm and his followers. What is more, both texts, the Disputatio and the mathematical Propositiones, not only recast and often playfully expand some of the established subjects and themes of Anglo-Latin riddling, but also deploy the very narrative strategies and stylistic formula that are characteristic of the genre, both in Latin and the vernacular. Typically, Alcuin’s own verse and prose riddles both echo and mediate this rich heritage, pointing forward to the Old English verse riddles of the 10th-century Exeter Book

Der Bilderhimmel von Hergiswald

Die Wallfahrtskirche Hergiswald bei Luzern zählt zu den schönsten und originellsten Sakralbauten in der Schweiz. Ihre bemalte Holzdecke von 1654 ist voller bunter Symbole und geheimnisvoller Sprüche – der berühmte Hergiswalder Bilderhimmel. Erstmals seit der jüngsten Gesamtrestaurierung werden sämtliche 324 Bildtafeln dieses größten und bedeutendsten Sinnbilder-Zyklus des europäischen Barock farbig abgebildet und erläutert. Das Buch behandelt zudem die Wallfahrts- und Baugeschichte der Hergiswalder Kirche anhand zeitgenössischer Dokumente, porträtiert die Schöpfer der Sinnbilder, umreisst die Themen und Geheimnisse des Bilderhimmels und berichtet von dessen Wiederentdeckung – eine Fülle von Quellenmaterial zur Entschlüsselung dieser faszinierenden Bilderrätsel

Say What I Am Called: The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book and the Anglo-Latin Riddle Tradition

Perhaps the most enigmatic cultural artifacts that survive from the Anglo-Saxon period are the Old English riddle poems that were preserved in the tenth century Exeter Book manuscript. Clever, challenging, and notoriously obscure, the riddles have fascinated readers for centuries and provided crucial insight into the period. In Say What I Am Called, Dieter Bitterli takes a fresh look at the riddles by examining them in the context of earlier Anglo-Latin riddles. Bitterli argues that there is a vigorous common tradition between Anglo-Latin and Old English riddles and details how the contents of the Exeter Book emulate and reassess their Latin predecessors while also expanding their literary and formal conventions. The book also considers the ways in which convention and content relate to writing in a vernacular language. A rich and illuminating work that is as intriguing as the riddles themselves, Say What I Am Called is a rewarding study of some of the most interesting works from the Anglo-Saxon period