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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.
Exeter Book Riddle 47 (according to the numbering of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records) is one of the most famous of the Old English riddles found in the later tenth-century Exeter Book. Its solution is ' book-worm ' or 'moth'.
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 12 (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.Its solution is accepted to be 'ox/ox-hide' (though variations on this theme, focusing on leather objects, have been proposed).
Exeter Book Riddle 7 (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. The solution is believed to be 'swan' and the riddle is noted as being one of the Old English riddles whose solution is most widely agreed on. [2]
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 60 (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.The riddle is usually solved as 'reed pen', although such pens were not in use in Anglo-Saxon times, rather being Roman technology; but it can also be understood as 'reed pipe'.