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One riddle, known as Exeter Book riddle 30, is found twice in the Exeter Book (with some textual variation), indicating that the Exeter Book was compiled from more than one pre-existing manuscript collection of Old English riddles. [1] [2] Considerable scholarly effort has gone into reconstructing what these exemplars may have been like. [3]
Some of the riddles are double entendres, setting out entirely innocent subject matter in language filled with bawdy connotations, such as Riddle 25 below. Two Exeter Book riddles are presented below, with Modern English translations alongside the Old English originals. Proposed answers to the riddles are included below the text.
Riddles are an internationally widespread feature of oral literatures and scholars have not doubted that they were traditional to Old English culture. [1] But the history of riddles as a literary genre in England seems to be rooted in an influential collection of late Antique Latin riddles, possibly from north Africa, attributed to a poet called Symphosius, whose work English scholars emulated ...
Exeter Book Riddle 25 (according to the numbering of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records) [1] is one of the Old English riddles found in the later tenth-century Exeter Book. Suggested solutions have included Hemp, Leek, Onion, Rosehip, Mustard and Phallus, but the consensus is that the solution is Onion.
Exeter Book Riddle 5; Exeter Book Riddle 7; Exeter Book riddle 9; Exeter Book Riddle 12; Exeter Book Riddle 24; Exeter Book Riddle 25; Exeter Book Riddle 26; Exeter Book Riddle 27; Exeter Book Riddle 30; Exeter Book Riddle 33; Exeter Book Riddle 44; Exeter Book Riddle 45; Exeter Book Riddle 47; Exeter Book Riddle 51; Exeter Book Riddle 60 ...
The characterization of the poem as a riddle is the oldest of its various treatments, the argument for which characterization is based largely upon the obscurity of its subject and the placement of the poem within the Exeter Book, where it was included as Riddle I in Benjamin Thorpe's 1842 translation of the Exeter Book. [9]
Krapp, George Philip and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie (eds), The Exeter Book, The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), p. 236. Williamson, Craig (ed.), The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977).
Exeter Book Riddle 9 (according to the numbering of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records) [1] is one of the Old English riddles found in the later tenth-century Exeter Book, in this case on folio 103r–v. The solution is believed to be 'cuckoo'. [2] [3] [4] The riddle can be understood in its manuscript context as part of a sequence of bird-riddles. [5]