AUTHORSHIP AND UNITY
IN THE EXETER BOOK RIDDLES
by
John Neilson Mason B.A., University of British Columbia, 1972
A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS
in
THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES Department of English
We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard
THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA May, 1976
© John Neilson Mason, 1976 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study.
I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the Head of my Department or by his representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission.
Department of ENGLISH
The University of British Columbia 2075 Wesbrook Place Vancouver, Canada V6T 1W5
Date MAY 7, 1976 - ii -
ABSTRACT
Nineteenth-century scholars generally felt that the Exeter Book riddle collection was a unified whole under the authorship of Cynewulf, or that it was made up of two major parts, Riddles "1" (now known as
"Wul'f and Eadwacer") to 59 and 61-95. Most scholars since the first decade of this century, however, have viewed the riddles as a miscellany, with a few individual riddles perhaps sharing common authorship, but with no overall unity or organization in the collection as a whole.
If the riddles are examined in terms of their point of view (I am...,
I saw..., There is...), a distinct pattern emerges which demonstrates
Riddles 61-95 to be separate from the rest, and which also divides
Riddles 1-59 into two more or less equal groups. The distribution of point of view does not indicate the exact point of division between the first two groups, but if the groups originally comprised 60 riddles
(like the collection of Eusebius), and if the two groups are assumed to have been equal collections of 30, then deduction based on the amount of missing material due to the loss of folios between fols. 105 and 106, and between 111 and 112, would locate the break between Riddles
29 and 30. Riddle 30b, then, could have been simply a mis-start of the second group at a point later in the MS. Examination of the distribution of opening and closing formulas arid of the adverbs hwilum, oft and nu over the collection supports the three-part theory.
Stylistic diversity in the third group, from crude riddles like
Nos. 75 and 76 to the fine 'horn' and 'water' riddles suggests that
•oh:' - this group is a miscellany containing the work of a number of authors.
Connections between riddles of this group and the two earlier ones appear to indicate some sort of dependence of these on riddles of the first two groups. The relationship in several of the cases can be explained as imitation or modelling of the later riddles on earlier ones. Such a suggestion is not inconsistent with practice at the time, as other riddles of the period appear to have been used as exercises in grammar. - iv -
CONTENTS
Page CHAPTER I THE CYNEWULFIAN CONTROVERSY 1
Footnotes to Chapter I 18
CHAPTER II IS THERE UNITY IN THE COLLECTION? 21
Treatment of Material 21
Unity and Sources 27
Arguments Based on Date 29
Footnotes to Chapter II 35
CHAPTER III SECTIONS OF THE TEXT AS SEPARATE UNITS 37
Evidence for Distinct Groups in the Collection 37
The Original Groupings Ul
Opening and Closing Formulas, and Three Adverbs i|8
The Relationship Between the Groups 57
Footnotes to Chapter III 66
CONCLUSION 69
LIST OF WORKS CONSULTED 71
APPENDIX A 77.
APPENDIX B 78
APPENDIX C 80 _ v -
LIST OF TABLES
Table I Distribution of Points of View p. 38
Table II Distribution of Opening and Closing Formulas p. 50
Table III Frequency of Opening and Closing Formulas p. 51
Table IV Occurrence of hwilum, oft and nu i. Adverb Begins Half-Line p. 53 ii. Scribal Point Precedes Adverb p. 51i - vi -
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1 Forster's Collation of Gatherings XIV, XVI and XVII p. hh
Figure 2 Possible Loss from Gathering XVII p. kh - vii -
ABBREVIATIONS
REB Frederick Tupper, ed., The Riddles of the Exeter Book (Boston:
Ginn and Co., 1910).
K-D G.P. Krapp and E.vK. Dobbie, eds., The Exeter Book (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1936).
EBOEP R.W. Chambers, Max Forster and Robin Flower, eds., The Exeter
Book of Old English Poetry (London: Lund, Humphries and Co., 1933). - yiii-
Note on Numbering
The four, most widely-used editions of the Exeter Book riddles today are those of Tupper, Wyatt, Mackie and Krapp and Dobbie; earlier scholars usually used Grein's edition.1 Unfortunately, all these editions vary in their systems of numbering the riddles. Tupper includes "Wulf and Eadwacer" as his Riddle 1, but presents K-D 68 and
69 as one riddle. Wyatt and Mackie also group 68 and 69, but Mackie
omits K-D 90, the Latin Riddle. Grein includes "Wulf and Eadwacer,"
but omits the fragments K-D 78, 82, 89, 92 and 9U.
All numbering in this study will follow the Krapp and Dobbie
system, but the following key can be used for adjusting the other
systems to K-D numbering.
Wyatt THEEe r K-D 1-68 = W 1-682 K'- D 1-68 = T 2-69 (K-D = T-l) K-D 69-89 = W 683-88 (K-D - W+l) K-D 69-95 = T 69-95 K-D 91-95 = W 89-93 (K-D = W+2)
Mackie Grein
,2 K-D 1-66 » G 2-67 K-D 1-68 = M 1-68' K-D 68 = G 681"2 J K-D 69-95 = M 683-94 (K-D = M+l) K-D 69-77 = G 68 -76 K-D 79-81 = G 77-79 K-D 83-88 = G 80-85 K-D 90-91 = G 86-87 K-D 93 = G 88 K-D 95 = G 89
1 C W M Grein, Bibliothek der Angelsachsischen Poesie (Goetingen: Georg H. Wigands Verlag, ltJbo), n, Joy-u07- CHAPTER I
THE CYNEWULFIAN CONTROVERSY
A study of authorship and unity in the Exeter Book riddles is inextricably involved with the Cynewulfian controversy. This is the scholarly dispute which raged in the nineteenth century, and a little into the twentieth, in which opinions were voiced concerning possible authorship by Cynewulf of almost every piece of Anglo-Saxon poetry extant. The riddles were at the heart of the Cynewulfian dispute, due to charades on the name Cynewulf which were supposedly found in two of the riddles, and on alleged biographical details in another.
These charades were thought to be similar to the runic signatures found in the four 'signed' Cynewulfian poems. The idea of Cynewulfian authorship of the riddles came for a while to be regarded almost as an established fact, but began losing favor in the 1880*s. Many scholars, still held to the theory, though, and it continued to be revived sporadically until 1910.
The basis of the theory which assigned authorship to Cynewulf, indeed virtually the only piece of evidence upon which all the later opinions were grounded, was Heinrich Leo's solution of the so-called 1 v r 'First Riddle.' This poem, which appears on Folios 100 and 101 of the Exeter Book, and which immediately precedes in the MS the first group of what are now considered by most scholars the true riddles, is now generally known as "Wulf and Eadwacer."
The inspiration for Leo's solution took place in 18U0, with the almost simultaneous, though completely independent discoveries, by 2 3 Jacob Grimm and John M. Kemble, that the runes at the end of the - 2 -
Old English poems "Elene," "Juliana," and "Christ II," when properly arranged, formed the name Cynewulf in the first two cases, and Cynwulf in the third. Grimm and Kemble suggested that the person in question might be Cenwulf, Abbot of Peterborough, who flourished in the early tenth century; Grimm assigned no historical significance to the name, but supposed Cynewulf to have been an eighth-century Northumbrian, per• haps a pupil of Aldhelra.
The discovery of an author's name connected with Anglo-Saxon verse, in contrast to the usual complete anonymity of the poetry, was an exciting find which prompted a minute search over the next few decades for more hidden signatures in Old English poetry. As well, specifically
Cynewulfian features were claimed for many unsigned poems, and scholars tentatively assigned more and more works to Cynewulf. An early product of this research, and one which added considerable impetus to further investigation, was Leo's 'discovery' in 18£7^ of a charade in the
First Riddle, which, he claimed, revealed the name of Cynewulf. By a process of emendation and twisting of meaning to suit his purpose, ,
Leo produced an ingenious interpretation which finds the whole poem to be a play on the syllables of Cynewulf's name. I reproduce here the original and Leo's interpretation. For Morley's English trans• lation of Leo see Appendix A. - 3 -
. Leodum is minura swylce him mon lac gifej willa3 hy hlne abecgan, gif he on breat cyme5. Ungelic is us. Wulf is on iege, ic on oberre. Faest is baet eglond, fenne biworpen. Sindon waelreowe weras baer on ige; willa8 hy hine apecgan, gif he on preat cyme5. Ungelice is us. Wulfes ic mines widlastum wenum dogode; bonne hit waes renig weder ond ic reotugu saet, bonne mec se beaducafa bogum bilegde, waes me wyn to pon, waes me hwaebre eac lad. Wulf, min Wulf, wena me pine seoce gedydon, pine seldcymas, murnende mod, nales meteliste. Gehyrest pu, Eadwacer? Uncerne earne hwelp bireo wulf to wuda. ?aet mon eabe tosliteS j>aette naefre gesomnad waes, uncer giedd geador.
Meine Glieder verhalten sich wie man ihnen Bedeutung zutheilt; Sie werden dieselbe offenbaren, wenn die Bedeutung sich zusammenschaart.
(2) Ungleich verhSlt sich's mit uns. Ein Wolf ist auf einer Insel, ich auf der andern: Vollkommen ist die Insel mit Sumpfland umgeben. Wilde Manner sind hier auf dem Eilande. Sie werden dieselbe offenbaren, wenn er mit (ihrer) Schaar zusammenkommt.
(3) Ungleich verh< sich's mit uns. Ich gebe mich den weitgehenden Sehnsuchten nach meinem Wolf hin. Wenn es regniges Wetter war und ich weinend sass, Dann umfasste mich der Kampfschnelle mit seinen Armen. Das ward mir Wonne, ward mir doch auch Leid. Wolf! mein Wolf! die Sehnsuchten nach dir Haben mich krank gemacht, deine seltenen Besuche; Das trauernde Gemuth (that's), nicht durch Nahrungsmangel. H6rst du? Eadwaccer, unserer beider Jungen, tr'agt ein Wolf zum Holze.
(U) Das sondert man leicht aus einander, was nie Zusammenhang hatte, Unserer beider gemeinschaftliches Lied.^ - h -
Leo's Olieder, 'limbs,' are the first and last syllables of
Cynewulf's name: the reader is to guess them by recognizing their representations through homonyms and parallel meanings, which Leo supposes to be worked into various parts of the riddle.
After the opening section (Leo's division l), the first syllable speaks. The riddler metaphorically demonstrates the separation of the syllables by placing them on separate islands. The waelreowe weras,
'cruel or bloodthirsty men,' on the first syllable's island are to be interpreted as cene, 'keen or fierce men,' which the solver is then to interpret as cyne, identifying the first part of the name.
In the third section cyne is again identified, this time in coen, or cwen, which, Leo says, is the woman who is in love with a man named
Wulf. Wuda, 'wood,' is assumed to stand for cen, 'pine torch.' Leo claims that if cen is though of as 'split wood,' the association is simple. Cen, which is the C-rune in Cynewulf»s runic signature, is to represent cyn. The word Eadwacer Leo interprets as merely a personification of the letter e, which joins cyn and wulf; Wulf carries Eadwacer to cyn, the wood.
According to Leo the closing section of the poem means that though the charades cyne, coen and cwen are joined together (in the substance
of the charade), they are easily taken apart by the solver, as they
are after all not identical in sound.
On the strength of the evidence of a single poem, Leo is cautious
about crediting the entire Exeter Book riddle collection to Cynewulf,
but if not all the riddles are Cynewulfs, he says, those whose answers
are the names of runic letters probably are. ! Dietrich, in his first article on the riddles," fully supports
Leo's solution of the First Riddle as a charade on Cynewulfs name, and finds further support for Cynewulfian authorship in two more of the enigmas. In the Latin Riddle he finds the repetition of the word lupus strongly reminiscent of the "wulf min wulf" phrase and of the other repetitions of the word wulf in the First Riddle, and feels these suggest some sort of charade. The last riddle Dietrich solves as
'wandering singer.' This riddle, he concludes, again refers to Cynewulf, this time autobiographically as a young itinerant scop.
The whole collection cannot possibly be by Cynewulf, though,
Dietrich says, because in Riddles 61-95 several of the earlier riddle objects are handled a second time, and in a way similar to their treat• ment in the first section. A good poet, he reasons, would not repeat himself. Also, as the riddles are separated in the manuscript into two distinct groups, with one additional riddle and the repeat of another inserted along with other material between, the likelihood of unity is further reduced. Yet,' he says, at least two poems of Cynewulfs appear in the final portion. To account for this, Dietrich proposes that the collection comprises the work of two or more authors, the first group of riddles being Cynewulfs alone, and the last group a collection including single riddles of Cynewulfs, but with the majority by another poet or poets. 9
In his second article, however, Dietrich expands his claims, this time assigning the entire collection to Cynewulf, and going so far as to propose that the first group is the product of Cynewulfs youth and the second of his maturity. In the first group he finds - 6 - evidence of the poet's youthfulness in the mistaken translation of
Aldhelm's pernix aquilis, 'swift eagle,' as pernex, an imaginary bird, in line 65 of Riddle 1+0; in the youthful cadence of the poetry; and in the presence of five 'obscene' riddles, 25, U2, UU, ii5, 5U« Dietrich seeks to support his claims by comparing thoughts and expressions in the Riddles with other Cynewulfian poems. But, as Tupper remarks, "The larger number of parallels (granting that such parallelism carries any weight) are drawn from a text of such doubtful authorship as the
Andreas.
The charade solution was generally accepted for the next 20 years, the only dissenting voice being Reiger's in 1869. Reiger*"'" feels that
Leo's argument for extracting cene as the first part of the name from waelreowe is "too thin." He also rejects Leo's problematical rendering of the first line, preferring to find the first-syllable charade in leodum minum (which Leo had emended to leo&um minum), which he interprets to signify cynn. Reiger admits some difficulties, however. In the sense of the passage, he says, leodum would be closer in meaning to dryht than to cynn.
To account for the e in the first charade, he adapts his found- word to the form cynne. Similarly, he adapts coen and cwen to coene and cwene. In the third charade he follows Leo in supposing the first syllable to be found in wuda = cen, with the missing e filled in by
Eadwacer. But whereas Leo had read Eadwacer uncerne earne hwelp as object of bire5 (1. 17), with wulf the subject and gehyrest bu a rhetorical question, Reiger argues that the question mark should be placed after Eadwacer, making Eadwacer (= e) the object of gehyrest. The subject of bire5 would now be uncerne earne hwelp. The result of the adjustment is that it is not now the e that is taken to the wood and thereby connected to cen, but wulf. Reiger translates the final lines of the poem: "Do you hear Eadwacer, our angry whelp? He carries the wolf to the wood, (one easily breaks apart what was never put 12 together) our riddleword together." The parenthetical line he interprets as an aside comment by the riddler on the art of charade- making. Despite his differences with Leo, Reiger does not dispute the idea that the piece is a charade, or that the solution is the name Cynewulf. In 1883 Trautmann made the first solid attack on Leo's solution 13 to the First Riddle. His argument focusses on LU objections, some of which do not wholly exclude the possibility of Leo's being right, but none of which can be ignored. Cumulatively they were devastating to Leo's interpretation. Trautmann's objections are: 1. There exist no other syllable riddles of the form "my first is..., my second is..., my whole is..." in Old English, nor indeed in the entire literature of the Middle Ages.-^ 2i Leo's first two lines are a shambles: a. It is unjustifiable to emend leodum to leoSum, since it makes good sense as it stands. b. swylce does not mean simply 'as,' but 'as if.1 c. lac does not mean 'meaning,' but 'gift.' d. abecgan does not mean 'reveal,' but 'take up.' e. nine, he cannot refer to lac, as lac is neuter. 3. a. Trautmann doubts that the first two lines indicate a charade at all. In all three places where the rune signature exists—"Elene," "Christ," and "Juliana,"—the second letter of the name is given by the rune Yr, so the first part of the name cannot be assumed to be anything but cyn: not cen, coen or espe• cially cwen. b. Riddles are by tradition directed more to the ear than to the eye. U. Line 5 faest is baet eglond fenne beworpen is ignored in Leo's translation. - 8 -
3>. The supposed extraction of cene from waelhreowe is much too difficult.
6. paer on ige cannot be translated as 'here onfmy island.'
7. Leo's translation of abecgan as 'reveal' is wrong. It is a forced interpretation, dependent on the meeting of the wild men with the wolf, when actually Leo says they are on different islands.
8. The translation of wen as longing is wrong.
9. Trautmann doesn't see why a lamenting woman would call her beloved beaducafa, when more appropriate would be husband, friend, beloved, splendid one, untrue one, cruel one, inconstant one, or some such.
10. waes me hwae&re eac laS is not understandable by Leo's interpretation: a longing woman would feel joy, not pain, if her beloved came and embraced her.
11. It is possible that the e of Cynewulf's name can be called the 'bond' between the first and third syllables, but that this letter should denote the offspring would be rare and inappropriate.
12. To think that wuda = cen is unreasonable.
13. In no sense can the syllable wulf (1. 16-17) be said to carry the e to the syllable cen.
Iii. Leo's translation of the last two lines is not valid, as geador cannot be taken as other than adverbial.
Along with his attack on Leo, Trautmann offers his own solution,
'riddle,' in which the wolf is the solver and the woman the riddle.
Eadwacer, the whelp of the solver and the riddle, is the solution.
Trautmann finds the identical solution, 'riddle,' for the last enigma of the collection, which Dietrich had solved as 'der fahrende SMnger,' and further declares that the finding of a reference to Cynewulf in the repeated lupus of the Latin riddle is merely a matter of opinion— one which he does not share. Therefore, he reasons, if neither the first riddle nor the last refers to Cynewulf, and if the Latin riddle shows no allusion to him, then there is no evidence at all for assigning - 9 - authorship to him. 15
Nuck attacked Trautmann's new solution in 1888, claiming that it was even more difficult than Leo's. Hicketier,1^ in the same publication, presents an elaborate defence of Leo, and claims that the hwelp is Cynewulf himself, with Eadwacer his father and the female speaker his mother. Hicketier also dismisses Trautmann's comments on
Riddle 90 and his solution of Riddle 95, and favors a retention of
Dietrich's opinions. 17
Henry Morley, in his English Writers, agrees with Trautmann in dismissing Leo's solution. "Noiman bdrn of woman," he exclaims, "would, with the natural wit to which riddles appeal, go through such a process of interpretation as is here suggested*" But Morley also rejects
Trautmann's solution not only of the First Riddle, but of the last, as well as Dietrich's comments on the Latin riddle. Morley takes all three to be religious pieces, with the wolf of both the First Riddle and the Latin riddle being the devil. In the Latin riddle, he explains: The marvel of the Lamb that overcame the wolf and tore its bowels out is the Lamb of God who overcame the devil and destroyed his power. The great glory then seen was of "the lamb that had been slain," the Divine appointment,of the agony of one of the three Persons of the Trinity. The four feet were the four gospels; and the seven eyes refer to the Book of Revelation, where the seven eyes of the Lamb are the seven spirits of God sent forth into all the earth. The First Riddle he solves as 'the Christian preacher':
He is welcome to the people as one who brings gifts, the promises of the Gospel^ and is received when he comes amongst them. He is on one island, of the spiritual life; upon the other island, of the fleshly life, is the wolf, the devil. The island is surrounded by the swamps of sin, and men in it are fierce and cruel. But they will receive the preacher of Christ when he comes among them. Their positions are unlike. Upon that island of the flesh there is - 10 -
suffering from the passionate desires that are of the wolf; when tears come with the sense of distress, there are worldly pleasures from embrace of the strong destroyer; but pain comes with them. There is yearning of the flesh towards the devil, grief from the expectation that the does*not satisfy, not for want of the true bread of life. There is the preaching. Hearest thou it? Eadwaccer— the word means custos bonorum, watcher over our wealth—the child of us both, of Christian teacher and of the flesh. He carries the wolf to the wood:1" he brings the power of the devil over us to the rood tree, the wood of the Cross. Men who have never been joined in Christian brotherhood, and who are easily parted from each other, our music brings together.
"So vanishes the name of Cynewulf out of the riddle, into which it had been too ingeniously read," Morely declares. The last enigma Morley
solves as 'the Word of God.' "We have, then," he concludes, "no evidence upon which to ground a belief that Cynewulf wrote any of the First-
English riddles." 19
Henry Bradley, in a review of Morley, agrees with his rejection
of Leo. As for Trautmann's 'riddle' solution, Bradley says, "Let the
reader compare this ingenious interpretation with any translation of
the "riddle" that attempts to be fairly literal, and refrain from smiling
if he can." Nevertheless, he could not accept Morley's solution.
Bradley's own feelings on the matter supplied the beginnings of what is
now the generally held view about the ' First Riddle.' It was his opinion
that "the so-called riddle is not a riddle at all, but a fragment of a
dramatic soliloquy, like 'Deor' and 'The Banished Wife's Complaint,' to
the latter of which it bears, both in motive and in treatment, a strong
resemblance." He added that the true form of the piece isso far from
being really riddle-like that the idea of its being a riddle probably
"would never have occurred to anyone but for the accident that the
fragment appears at the head of the riddles of the Exeter Book." - 11 -
20 Sievers, in 1891, delivered the final blow to Leo's theory with his presentation of philological arguments against the charade. First of all, he says, the preservation of the suffix vowel e in the first part of the compound, Cyne (or Cyni, in the older form), proves, according to the laws of syncopation, that the stem vowel must be short, and that it is related to cynn, not, as Leo would have it, with cen. Secondly, Leo's supposed form Coenewulf is impossible, as the length of the oe demands the syncopation of the old i—i.e. the only possible form would be Coenwulf, with no mid-vowel. Sievers lists a number of examples of such forms. Thirdly, he argues, cyne-coene-cen- cwoen could not, under the laws of the Old Northumbrian dialect, be interchanged due to similar accent, because Old Northumbrian made the distinction between the sounds oe and e particularly sharp. Further philological analysis led Sievers to conclude that the riddles predate
Cynewulf, and so could not have been written by him.
Despite the doubts of Trautmann, Bradley and Sievers and their supporters that any of the riddles refer to Cynewulf, the idea of
Cynewulfian authorship continued to be held, for a few years at least, by many scholars. Indeed, the whole sphere of ,01d English academic inquiry in the late nineteenth century seemed almost preoccupied with the Cynewulfian question, with the result that a few scholars exceeded the bounds of reasonability in assigning authorship to Cynewulf. From 21 the original three 'signed' poems the supposed Cynewulfian canon had swelled to include not only the riddles, but nearly every piece of
Anglo-Saxon poetry evensremotely acceptable by date to be his. In 1886 22 Sarrazin even went so far as to credit "Beowulf" to Cynewulf, basing - 12 - his opinion on stylistic comparison. This claim brought the total of
Cynewulf's supposed accomplishments to nearly three-quarters of all the 23
Old English verse extant! Kail, however, showed the absurdity of over-reliance on Sarrazin's stylistic method by using it successfully to show Cynewulfian authorship of poems which chronologically could not possibly be his.
The fervor for wide attributions of authorship to Cynewulf subse• quently subsided, and by the end of the century there was general
scepticism toward Cynewulfian authorship of most unsigned poems.
Following a study in 1900 by Madert,^ which found the riddles to have little in common with the style and word usage of Cynewulf, the idea of
Cynewulfian authorship of the Exeter riddles was rejected by the majority of scholars.
The search for evidence of Cynewulf in the riddles was rekindled 25
in 1903, however, when Edmund Erlemann claimed to have found another
charade on Cynewulfs name, this time in the Latin Riddle.
Mirum uidetur mihi, lupus ab agno tenetur; obcubuit agnus rupi et capit uiscera lupi. Dum starem et misarem, uidi gloriam magnam, dui lupi stantes et tertium tribulantes; 2g iiii pedes habebant, cum septem oculis uidebant. It seems to me marvellous; a wolf is held by a lamb; the lamb has lain down on a rock and seizes the entrails of the wolf. While I stood and wondered, I saw an equally glorious thing, two wolves were standing and tormenting a third. They had four feet and saw with seven eyes. ' Erlemann's charade is combined with a sort of anagram, which he finds
easier to explain by numbering the letters of the name as follows:
CYNEWULF 12 3 4 5 6 7 8 - 13 -
The lupus of the first line, he says, is WULF, letters 5-8, and ab agnus is EWU, U-6. Thus line lb reads: "WULF is held by EWU." The two overlap, W and U being covered twice. The uiscera lupi of line 2b he takes to be the duo lupi (Erlemann emends from dui) of lia, lupi being taken as genitive and duo as neuter. These in Erlemann's view represent
L and F, the two remaining letters of WULF which are not siezed (i.e. overlapped) by EWU.
Erlemann makes no mention of the first syllable, CYN, but presumably felt its charade lies in the obscure second portion of the riddle. He points out that the letter groupings of this charade are similar to those in Cynewulf's runic signature in 'Juliana" 703-711, where they appear as CYN, EWU and LF. Indeed, the duo lupi, standing for L and
F, he says, may be related to the LF of the "Juliana" passage, which has still not been adequately explained.
Because of Sievers' work on the dates of composition of various riddles, Erlemann agrees that the old theory which held Cynewulf as the single author of all the riddles must be abandoned, but suggests that the authorship of each should be judged independently. He admits that Riddle 90 has a unique place in the collection because it is in
Latin, and that the discovery of Cynewulfian authorship of this one riddle need not prove anything for the rest, but prefers to favor the possibility of Cynewulfian authorship of some other riddles, especially those following Latin models. He proposes that Cynewulf in his youth
(c.JkO) was the author of this riddle and of some others, and that he was the collector of the rest: "einen jungen, ubermQtigen Scholaren, der mancherlei Wissen, wenig Wurde und noch viel derbe Sinnlischkeit -14 - hat."28
Joseph Gotzen, in a note appended to Erlemann's article, alters the argument somewhat. The duo lupi, he says, mean WU, not LF. The terbium is L, the third letter of WULF. The iiii pedes signify CINE
in a figurative sense, supplying the missing portion of the name.
The septem oculi are CYNEWUL, the first seven letters of the name.
The eighth, F, Gotzen explains, has already been established by the mention of lupus (= WULF) in the first line, and the number seven is
brought in to create further subtlety.
Fritz Erlemann, twoLyears later, further refined his namesake's
theory. He followed Gotzen in seeing W and U as the duo lupi stantes.
E, the first letter of EWU, he says, is left over, and is the tertium
which is driven out by the duo lupi. Thus, if the E is driven out
(i.e. discarded), the form CYNWULF remains. This form contains seven
letters, which are the septem oculis of line Ub. The iiii pedes mean
WULF, the last four letters of the name.
Tupper, in the notes to Riddle 90 in his edition of the riddles,
says that "while the Erlemann solution doesisnot compel acceptance, it 30
surely invites close attention." In the introduction to his edition,
though, he is less open to the possibility of a connection between the
riddles and Cynewulf: "In the absence of one jot of evidence connecting
the Riddles with this poet,...the heavy burden of proof rests upon 31
him who seeks to revive the moribund claim of Cynewulfian authorship."
By November of the same year, however, Tupper had changed his mind.
It was he himself who sought to revive the claim. Tupper developed a
new interpretation of the 'First Riddle' which again found it to be a -15 - riddle, incorporating a new charade on the name Cynewulf, and a runic signature as well. "The guise of the lyrical monologue it certainly has," he says, "but it seems also to bear the stamp of Cynewulf's cypher....The poem, whether by coincidence or no (and the chances are enormous against a merely accidental concourse of so many elements), may easily be read as a cryptogram..., combining acrostic and charade. 32
Both were popular at this time." Acrostics were used by Aldhelm,
Tatwine and Boniface, he points out, and a charade was used in AEthel- wald's priscus cassis for Aldhelm. Tupper also cites one tenth-century example in which both acrostic and charade are used at once; folio
78b of Bodleian MS C697.
The key to the solution lies in the second line, Tupper claims.
He translates: "They (leod or Cyn) will oppress him (Wulf), if he comes to want or need (fareat or Nyd)—that is, Cyn will oppress or press upon Wulf if the syllable comes to N, the last letter of Cyn."^
The line is so important, Tupper argues, that the poet repeats it a few lines later. According to Tupper hine and he refer to Wulf, who has probably been referred to in a line now missing. As in the previous solutions of this type, all of Tupper's found-words and rune names must be inferred by deduction through synonyms. - 16 -
Lcod = Cyr. • Leodum is mlnurn swylce him mon lac gife : lac = Feoh {F) hy=Cyn hint, he =z Wulf villaS hy hint iipecgan, gi( he on J»rea£ cymeiS. /treat = '2iyd (JV) Ungelic is us. Wulf ic-Cyn(?) "Wulf is on Tege, io on 5>erre ; 5 fiest is )*ct ejlond fenne biworpen, eg, i. c ea — Lagu (L) sindon tccclrcowe weras J5ir on Ige: ualreowe = Ctne (C) ( ?) Cyn Wulf willa'3 hjj hint ij>ecgan, gif he on //real cyme's. Nyd (iV) Un gel ice is us. •\Vulfcs ic mines widlastum venum hogode; ren — Lagii (?) 10 fonne liit was rcnig ueder ond ic reotugu stet, beaducafa = Ccne (C) ponne mcc 6C beaducafa bogum bilegdc : 6o
[Mln] wulf, ruin wulf, wena me pine tiyn, vtn = W seoce gedydou, J>Inc seldcymas, 15 murnende mod, nsllcs metellste. h-xelp = Cyn (?) Goliyrest )>u, Eadwacer? Uncerne eame htcelp Uncerne =?Zfr (U) bire"S wulf to wuda. pict mon &ij>e loslltefi Jwette niefre gesomnad uncer ciedd gcador. ^*
For the acrostic:
lac = Feoh = F
preat = Nyd . . . . . = N
eglond may originally have read ealond = ea = Lagu = L
waelreowe, beaducafa = Cyn . . . . . = C
bogum is to suggest boga = Yr . . . . = Y
wyn, wen ...... = W
uncer = Ur ...... ^_ U
FNLCYWU" = CYNWULF
Given this new evidence, Tupper proclaimed the burden of proof had now shifted to those who claim the poems are not, with a few exceptions, Cynewulf's: "The undoubted variations in meter, language and style from the usage in the generally accepted poems of Cynewulf are after all'too slight to avail against the explicit evidence of the 35" First Riddle and the substantiating testimony of Riddle 90." 16
Trautmann, in "Das Sogenannte Erste RStsel" in 1912, rebutted
Tupper*s argument. If the syllable wulf often seems so obvious, he -17-
argues, why is the other, cyn, only vaguely hinted at? The extraction
of cyn out of leodum (1), hjr (2, 7), ic (1+) and hwelp (16) seems unlikely, he says, and the relation of waelreowe and beaducafa (mascu•
line) to cyn (neuter), and ultimately to cen, is dubious. Equally
unlikely Trautmann finds the uncerne = ur association. And Tapper's
explanation for yr, bogum = boga = [ft, Trautmann points out with a
smile, starts with the same word Leo used to produce cen. It would be
just as easy, he exclaims, to produce the runes THKC-M^ (TUPPER)
from the poem as h fh } frh T Y (CYNWULF). "Sicher aber 1st, todsicher,
dass das kleine stuck night ein ratsel ist das den namen Cynewulf 37
aufgibt." But, he admits, nothing conclusive has really been brought
to light to prove it anything else.
Scholars since Tupper have generally treated the question of Cyne•
wulfian authorship of the riddles with great caution. Wulf and Eadwacer
has been since solved as a riddle, but not with reference to Cynewulf.
Most modern scholars prefer to treat the piece as a sort of enigmatic 39
lament. As for the other two supposedly Cynewulfian pieces, Riddles
90 and 95, there is little agreement as to solution, and few scholars
would risk supporting earlier beliefs in their Cynewulfian traits.
Cynewulfian authorship of some individual riddles is still considered
a possibility, but belief in the unity of the collection under one pen
is now unanimously rejected. - 18 -
FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER I
1. Heinrich Leo, "(juae de se ipso Cynevulfus (sive Cinevulfus sive Coenevulfus) poeta Anglosaxonicus tradiderit" (Halle: Programm, 1857).
2. Jacob Grimm, ed., Andreas und Elene (Kassel, 18J+0).
3. John M. Kemble, "On Anglo-Saxon Runes," Archaelogia 28(l8i;0), pp. 360-363.
i|. Leo, loc. cit.
5. G.P. Krapp and E.vK. Dobbie, eds., The Exeter Book (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), pp. 179-180.
6. leodum, 'people,' emended to leofrum, 'limbs.'
7. Cited in Albert S. Cook, ed., Christ of Cynewulf (Boston: Ginn and . Co., 1900), p. liv.
8. Franz Dietrich, " Die RSthsel des Exeterbuches: Wtirdung, Losung und Herstellung," Zeitschrift fur Deutsches Alterthum 11(1859), hh8-h90.
9. Dietrich, "Die RSthsel des Exeterbuches: Verfasser, Weitere Losung und Herstellung," Zeitschrift filr Deutsches Alterthum 12(1865), 232-252.
10. Frederick Tupper, Jr., ed., The Riddles of the Exeter Book (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1910), p. Iv.
' 11. Max Reiger, "fiber Cynewulf,"'Zeitschrift fur Deutsche Philologie 1(1869), 215-226.
12. ibid., p. 218.
13. Moritz Trautmann, "Cynewulf und die Ratsel," Anglia 6(1883), anzeiger 158-169.
lU. Though there were no other riddles in Old English in a form similar to Leo's suggestion for the 'First Riddle^' such charades did exist in contemporary Medieval literature in other languages.
15. R. Nuck, "Zu Trautmann's Deutung des Ersten und Neunundachtzigsten Ratsels," Anglia 10(1888), 391-39U-
16. F. Hicketier, "Funf Ratsel des Exeterbuches," Anglia 10(1888), 564-600.
17. Henry Morley, English Writers (London: Cassel and Co., 1888), vol. II, pp. 219-226. 18. Morley seems to mistranslate here, or at least to follow Leo in twisting the grammar of the original. Uncerne earne hwelp seems clearly accusative, so it should be the wolf which carries the child to the wood. See also Leo.
19. Henry Bradley, review of Morley's English Writers, vol II, in Acadamy 33(1888), 197-198.
20. Eduard Sievers, "Zu Cynewulf," Anglia 13(1891), 11-21.
21. A fourth signed poem was added when Napier found another runic signature CYNWULF in the "Fates of the Apostles" in 1888.
22. Gregor Sarrazin, "Beowulf und Kynewulf," Anglia 9(1886), 515-550.
23. J. Kail, "Ueber die parallelstellen in der angelsachsischen poesie," Anglia 12(1889), 21-UO.
2U. August Madert, Die Sprache der altenglischen Ratsel des Exeterbuches und die Cynewulffrage (Marburg: H. Bauer, 1900). '
25- Edmund Erlemann, "Zu den altenglischen Ratseln," Archiv 111(1903), 49-63.
26. Krapp and Dobbie, p. 2U0.
27. Mackie's translation, The Exeter Book Part II: Poems IX-XXXII, EETS No. 194 (London: Oxford University Press, 19310, p. 231.
28. E. Erlemann, p. 62.
29. Fritz Erlemann, "Zum 90. altenglischen Ratsel," Archiv 115(1905), 391-392.
30. REB, p. 232.
31. REB, p. lxii.
32. Tupper, "The Cynewulfian Runes of the First Riddle," MLN 25(1910), 237.
33. ibid., pp. 238-239.
34. ibid., p. 238.
35. ibid., p. 241.
36. Anglia 36(1912), 133-138.
37. ibid., p. 138.
38. H. Patzig, "Zum ersten Ratsel des Exeterbuches," Archiv 1U5(1923), 204-207, solves as 'millstone.' - 20 -
Notable exceptions are Norman E. Eliason, "On Wulf and Eadwacer" in Old English Studies in Honour of John C. Pope, ed. R.B. Burlin and E.B. Irving (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), 225-234, who thinks it is a mock lament by the author of a mis• transcribed poem, and Donald K. Fry, "Wulf and Eadwacer: A Wen Charm," Chaucer Review 5(1970), 247-263, who thinks it is a wen charm. - 21 -
CHAPTER II
IS THERE UNITY IN THE COLLECTION?
The question of unity or disunity in the Exeter riddles can be divided into several parts. Most basic, of course, is the question of whether the collection is a unified whole or some type of miscellany.
If it is a whole, is it all by one author (and if so who was he) or is it unified in some other way, such as by the organizing hand of an anthologist? If on the other hand it is not a unit, is it simply a jumble of enigmas put together more or less at random, or is there some detectable trace of organization in smaller segments of the collection? In this chapter I wish to examine arguments relating to unity from the approaches of treatment of material, use of sources and dating.
Treatment of Material
Nearly all of the advocates for unity in the riddles believed that if any one poet was the author of all of them, that poet was
Cynewulf. Believing that they saw the name Cynewulf in the "First
Riddle" and perhaps in one or two more (as discussed in Chapter I), and seeing a handful of other riddles with styles somewhat reminiscent of Cynewulf, they concluded by a line of fallacious reasoning that all of the riddles must be by him, and that therefore the collection must be a unified whole. More cautious scholars were often guilty of less serious forms of the same logic, though they were perhaps a little more justified in their claims.
The central arguments for unity arise mainly from Dietrich's work, though Dietrich himself did not firmly believe in the total unity of - 22 - the collection. In his first article Dietrich felt that the first
section, Riddles "l"-5>9, was a unit by one author, and that the last,
61-95, was a miscellany containing single riddles by the author
(Cynewulf) of the first. Evidence for unity in the first section was to
be found, he believed, in the interconnection between the subjects, in
the pervasive employment of Latin sources, and in the similarity of
treatment of subjects and use of language and opening and closing
formulas. Dietrich categorizes a great many of the riddles under headings
relating them to natural phenomena, religion, books and writing, weapons,
implements for work and so on, and argues that though the riddles he
lists are generally separated in the collection, this has been done
by the poet only to avoid making solution too easy. It must be noted,
however, that all of the classifications are based almost.'entirely
on solution, and that this type of organization is possible in the most
miscellaneous of groups of things, and can prove nothing in itself
about any genuine connection between individual riddles. (See also
Ebert's similar categorizations of the enigmas of Symphosius."'")
The riddles of the final group, he says, exhibit similarities
with many in the first section. Some of the subjects appear again,
often with similar handling. Moreover, he continues, the last riddle
and the Latin riddle both refer to Cynewulf. However, especially
because of the presence of Riddle 66, which is just a short, poor-
quality version of kO, Dietrich feels that the final section must,
to some extent at least, be different from the rest. Latin sources
are less pervasively and more freely used there than in the earlier
section, he says, and the opening and closing formulas are far less - 23 - elaborate. He suggests that the latter part is a miscellany containing individual riddles by Cynewulf, but in his second article proposes that it might after all be entirely by Cynewulf, but taken from a different manuscript—one from Cynewulf•s maturity. The idea is presented as a possibility only, leaving considerable doubt (Tupper's comments to the contrary) as to whether he placed much weight on the argument himself. The riddles of the minor section, 30b and 60, Dietrich justifiably declines to assign definitely to either the preceding section or to the following one, but says that he is inclined to the opinion that they should go with the first~30b because it is a repeat of a riddle in the first section, and 60 largely because of its use of
Symphosius. He suggests, though, that these two riddles may have been drawn by the scribe from yet another MS.
Herzfeld somewhat altered Dietrich's Cynewulfian theory,3 claiming that all the riddles are by a youthful Cynewulf. He points out their fresh interest in all manner of objects, their joi de vivre. which seems compatible with the frequent inclusion of salacious wit, and attributes the large number of hapax-legomena in the collection to
"a young poet...fond of choosing rare words which may seem to his audience new and surprising."^ However, because of the subsequent arguments of later scholars which cast grave doubts on the question of Cynewulfian authorship of the riddles (see Chapter I), Herzfeld later abandoned these opinions.
Of the scholars who doubted the unity theory, Trautmann was the most vocal. Though there are, he said, a few very limited areas in the collection which seem to show the influence of some ordering hand— - 2k -
7, 8, 9, 10 are all bird riddles, and hh, U5 and 61, 62, 63 are all
'obscene'—that is about all that permits any thought of the plan and connection which might be expected if the riddles were all from one pen.
When one weighs the differences between individual riddles in style, tone, ability and language, then it must be concluded that the Exeter riddles are not only no unified and similar collection, but that they must originate with different poets. And this conclusion is not surprising, as in the years 700-750 there were in England a whole line of men who composed Latin riddles, and so it seems only natural that there should have been also several who wrote in English.
Trautmann further remarks that the fairly wide agreement of words and phrases found in the riddles is as easily explained by assuming the presence of several authors as one, particularly as it is possible that the poets knew each other personally or through their writings.
Trautmann feels that Cynewulf, because of the dates of composition of the riddles, could not have been the possible author of more than hO, and that it is quite likely he was author of none. If any named poet is to be suggested as possible author of these riddles, he says,
Eusebius (or Hwaetbert, by his Old English name) has the best claim, for "remarkably often these remind one of him and his riddles remind 7 one of the Exeter riddles."
The most extensive study of the question of unity in the riddles, though, has been Tupper's, which systematically examines the entire collection, sifting out and comparing first the opening and closing formulas (REB lxv-lxvi) and then specific motives (lxvi-lxxv). This
"cursory survey," which goes on for nine tightly-packed pages, seems very impressive, and obviously impressed Tupper: "Such likenesses as
I have pointed out between the various riddles are sufficiently striking to establish homogeneity, and indeed they often compel belief in the g presence of a single hand in many of the problems." He concludes:
The Riddles, then, are homogeneous in their artistry. One of the finest proofs of this lies in the striking circumstance that almost every dark saying or obscure periphrase in our poems finds illuminating explanation elsewhere in the collection.... Now if certain art-riddles are found grouped in what is really a single collection; if, moreover, these riddles, after close analysis, are found to be homogeneous in their diction; if, too, large collections from single hands were common at that period,— the burden of proof rests not upon him who argues for unity of authorship, since every precedent and presumption are in his favor, but upon him who champions diversity of origin.
Even so, he says, there is a small group of riddles which could not have been written by the same author as the rest:
The servilely imitative temper of Aldhelm's translator in the enigmas of the 'Mail-coat.' and 'Creation' (Rid. 36, hi CK-D 3$, 40j ) differs so utterly from the prevailing tone in the collection, which is at its highest in the unchecked range of imitr- ation of the 'Storm' riddles (2-U [K-D 1-3J), that this inferiority cannot be explained with Dietrich by the changing inclination of one poet.-1-0
These reservations are expanded in Tupper's notes to the creation riddles, where he assumes two hands at work in Riddle K-D 40, the first of which is that of the translator of 35, and the second of which is also responsible for 66.
But is Tupper's conclusion of unity justified? Careful inspection reveals that many of Tupper's so-called parallels are dubious to say the least. Some are simply parallels in opening and closing formulas.
Some arise in all probability only out of similarity of subject treated,
U 5 as in the two bird riddles 8 and 2h: 8 hleobre ne mibe, 2h guofugles hleobor. Both birds mimic and make noise (the subject of both may be
'jay'). Others no doubt are parallel only because of common use of the formulaic language of riddle tradition. The phrases streamas stapu - 26 -
6 8 beataS, 2 , and mec stondende streamas beata5, 81 , seem parallel
enough until it is seen that the first refers to waves beating on the
shore and the second to rain beating on a weathercock. The image of water beating is one which is still in common use today, so the employ• ment of this not unusual image in such unrelated contexts seems to me
to be indicative of nothing at all. Similar metaphoric technique due not to common authorship but to riddle tradition probably underlies
supposed parallels such as 10"'" Neb waes min on nearwe, which refers to the barnacle form of the barnacle goose, 21^" Neb is min neberweard, which describes a plowshare, 31^ niberweard...waes neb hyre, the lower pipe of a bagpipe, and 34^ nebb bib hyre aet nytte niberweard gongefl, describing a rake. The first is probably unrelated to the other three,
and the similarity between these last no doubt arises from the common technique of animation, employed through the popular riddle metaphor which turns a pointed protruberance into a nose. Most important, the possibility must always be considered that specific parallels may
arise only from common formulaic or traditional patterns of wording.
Michael Onwuemene, in a 1970 doctoral dissertation for the University
of Kansas, has calculated that as many as h9-S% of the 2,476 half-lines
of the riddles are repeated wholely or in part when compared with the whole Old English poetic corpus.
Certainly there may be valid parallels among the riddles pointing
to common authorship of individual poems. But, as they are mixed in with
a huge mass of what must be mainly coincidental parallels, it seems to me unlikely that any truly substantiable results could be obtained from
this type of study. Unity and Sources
A number of scholars have attempted to use the handling of source
material in the riddles as evidence for showing unity or disunity of
parts or the whole of the Exeter riddle collection. Thorpe1'1' was the
first to point out the indebtedness of some of the riddles to Latin
authors. He believed the riddles to be all by one poet, and that any
traceable sources merely provided inspiration for essentially original
composition.
Dietrich agreed with Thorpe about the seeming originality of most
of the riddles, but was not as ready (in his first article, at least) to
attribute the entire collection to one author. Dietrich felt he could
distinguish a difference between the two major sections of the collection
in the extent of their use of Latin sources. The first section, he
says, is characterized by considerable use of Symphosius and Aldhelm; 12 indeed, 16, U7 and 60 contain word-for-word borrowings from Symphosius, 13
and 35, 38 and hO contain sentence-for-sentence renditions of Aldhelm.
In addition Dietrich points our six instances of more limited borrowing
inothe first section. In the second major part of the collection a
freer connection is seen between the Anglo-Saxon riddles and the Latin,
he claims. Examples of actual translations, two of which are found in
the first section, do not reappear in the last, and there are only a
few uses of Symphosius (65, 8U, 85, 86, 91),"^ and even fewer of
Aldhelm (63, 71, 84).
Subsequent scholars1'' generally did not attempt to show a difference
in use of sources in different parts of the collection, but concentrated mainly on tracing the sources of riddles, on assessing the extent of -28- borrowing, and on examining the related question of the originality of the Old English riddles.
Tupper felt that the collection was mainly by one author, and pointed out that the Latin sources are employed throughout the collection.
But though he calls Dietrich's evidence "very doubtful premises,"^ a 17 quick tabulation of Tapper's own results shows that of the 35 riddles which he feels demonstrate debt to Latin sources, 27 are in the section
1-59 and only seven are in the final group. The remaining riddle is 60,
•reed pipe,' which is found in the miscellaneous material between the two major riddle sections and cannot be assigned definitely to either.
Actually the data seems to bear out Dietrich's opinion more than
Tupper's, though a certain amount of caution must be used in assessing these figures due to dispute about whether specific riddles depend on
Latin sources or not (see Appendix B).
No attempt should be made to iise this method to compare the sections on the basis of the presence of folk elements, however. 18
Tupper*s and Wyatt's studies vary widely on this matter, largely due to the quite different principles of selection employed by the two scholars. Both believed that a large number of the riddles are folk productions, yet of the 18 riddles in Tupper's list and the 29 in
Wyatt's (more than 1-| times as many), only five (13, 29, 33, 45, 46) enjoy the agreement of both scholars. Trautmann, on the other hand, 19 felt there were virtually no folk elements at all in the riddles. - 29 -
Arguments Based on Date
To the early scholars, dating of the Exeter riddles went hand in hand with authorship. By general consensus the riddles were written by Cynewulf and therefore belonged to Cynewulf's period, though just what that period was was a matter of debate. As understanding of the philological principles underlying Old English sound changes increased, however, more supportable opinions about the date of the riddles sometimes resulted in arguments relating to the question of unity. 20
Sievers, in 1891, used datable features in four of the riddles in an attack on the theory of Cynewulfian authorship (see also Chapter I).
In the Leiden Riddle, which is a Northumbrian version of Exeter Riddle
35, there are a number of examples of unstressed i. Comparing several manuscripts whose date is more or less reliable due to other evidence,
Sievers concluded that the unstressed i > e change occurred in the
South and Midlands at about 750, with few exceptions, and that, judging from the few datable examples available from Northumbria, the change probably occurred there at about the same time. The few late examples of i forms, he says, are probably just mechanical repetitions of older spellings. The Leiden Riddle, then, and therefore Riddle 35, must predate this change. The cryptic word agof of Riddle 23 was no doubt originally agob, which is simply boga, 'bow,' in reverse. The original terminal soundSievers says, must have been represented earlier by b, but later by f; Riddle 23 must predate the transition, which took place a little earlier than the i> e change. The spelling of HANA and HAEN in Riddle k2 with a before the nasal instead of o in the first word and ae instead of a in the second also indicates a date - 30 - at the beginning of the eighth century, he says. Finally, the word formed by the runes in Riddle 19 is HAOFOC. The form ao, Sievers argues, is not a likely form for the umlaut of a, as it appears nowhere else. He therefore emends to HAFOC, which, with unumlauted a, he says, would again indicate the first half of the eighth century.;
For the second part of his argument Sievers points out that the name Cynewulf is spelled two ways in the runic signatures: CYNEWULF and
CYNWULF. These, he reasons, must be alternates. Both forms appear several times in Bede, but there the Cynewulf form, with its unstressed medial vowel, is always spelled Cyniwulf. Thus Sievers concludes that the riddles, which date from the period of unstressed i (on the evidence of Riddle 35, at least), must predate Cynewulf, who part of the time spelled his name with an unstressed e. Though Sievers was still assuming a unified collection as an almost unquestioned assumption, the groundwork for further development was laid. 21
Barnouw, in his linguistic study of Old English poetry in 1902, claims to have confirmed Sievers' results. By computing the frequency of occurrence of the definite article and other grammatical forms in datable Old English verse, Barnouw points out a general tendency toward a heavier use of the article in later poems and a more sparse occurrence in earlier ones. Comparing the Riddles with the accepted
Cynewulfian works, Barnouw concludes that because the frequency of the article is greater in the accepted works, the majority of the riddles must predate Cynewulf. Further, comparing the frequency in the riddles individually, he asserts that the riddles are scattered over a wide period of time, with little apparent organization in the collection except for one small group, 37, 38, 39, which could all be by the same - 31 - poet. Riddles 23 and h2, however, which Sievers had used as examples of early date, Barnouw declares to be late, due to their frequent employment of the article—four in the 16 lines of Riddle 23 ("the 22 article appears wherever possible" ) and seven in the 17 lines of Lj.2 23 ("we have here without doubt a very young riddle" )—and to the use of articles instead of demonstratives in U2. 2li
Tupper rejects both of these claims for dating the riddles.
He feels that Sievers' arguments for dating the i> e change were hasty and based on insufficient data, and provides several examples of the use of unstressed i in the ninth and tenth centuries. In addition,
Tupper declares, no generalization should be made from Riddle 35, as it has little in common with the other enigmas. He completely rejects
Sievers' argument concerning the datability of the b>f change in
Riddle 23.. "Are we to believe that a riddler in the latter part of the eighth or even in the ninth and tenth centuries was prevented by phonetic laws from inverting any word with an initial b and thus 26 forming a nonsense-word with an uncouth ending?" he asks, and presents three examples of terminal b from the ninth century. The presence of a instead of o and of ae instead of a in HANA and HAEN of Riddle U2 are both "well established West Saxon forms," he says. Similarly, the runic word HAFOC of Riddle 19 (if the unemended form is rejected) 3 67 is also an accepted West Saxon variant, found in Riddle 2h and I4.O , and in other places outside the riddles. But though he rejects Sievers' evidence, Tupper favors his conclusion of a date for the riddles somewhere in the first half of the eighth century, but cautions that 27 this is "only a surmise, which is perhaps incapable of proof." - 32 -
Barnouw's method is also unreliable, Tupper says, as it depends
in part on article use in opening and closing formulas which may not
have anything to do with the particular habits of the poet who used
them—for example ic pa wiht(e) geseah 37, 38, 68; ic wiht geseah 29,
3ii, 36—and makes no allowance for incidental inclusion of such archaic 12
forms as 12 hygegalan hond, where a weak adjective appears without
an article. Tupper notes two tenth-century examples of weak adjective without an article in the "Battle of Brunanburh." Barnouw's arguments,
Tupper declares, "seem to me to carry little weight. The normalizing
of later scribes, and the tendency to archaize, to use traditional
formulas and expressions, so strong in Anglo-Saxon poetry, render this
test almost valueless."^ 2°
Hacikyan, in 1966, ' attempted to apply Barnouw's techniques to
the riddles in order to prove a division between the sections of the
collection. Though Barnouw's methods have been considered dubious by the majority of scholars even when applied to fairly large bodies
of literature, Hacikyan embraces them without much reservation. By
examining the frequency of the definite article and other grammatical 30 forms in the first section (1-59) and comparing this to the frequency of the same forms in the last (61-95), he concludes that the two
sections probably share no overall unity of authorship (as they are
stylistically different in their employment of demonstratives), and
that the last section is probably older. As well, he lists more features in the riddles which he feels to be datable:
1. Comparison using the dative instead of a bonne phrase in kO^' e^°* (Madert^"1" points out 10 instances in this riddle)
and 84 ' Hacikyan takes to be indicative of an early date.
2. The form salwonge in 32 (instead of saelwonge) perhaps
indicates a date previous to the unstressed a> ae change, but
Hacikyan admits that the same feature could as easily be explained
by a late date as an early one, and that at any rate the spelling
could be merely a variant, as in Riddle 42 (nana).
3. "Another similar example is the occurrence of hyra instead
of hyre in Rid. 701 or grenne instead of grene in Rid. 665> . "
Hacikyan does not make it clear what these are similar to, or
upon which philological changes his claim is based.
4. The confusion between 5es and 5aes in 66^ Hacikyan feels
results from an inadvertent preservation of an early eighth-
century form.
5>. The spelling wambe 62 for wombe Hacikyan takes to indicate
an early date (a> o before nasal), but he admits it may be only
due to scribal inconsistency.
. 6. The preterite borcade 87^ as a form of beorcan, he says, 32 may indicate a date previous to the o> e change. Tupper and 33
Bosworth and Toller, however, see this as a regular preterite
form of an alternate verb, W2, borcian.
Hacikyan's statistical approach to dating the riddles, apart from its reliance on a method which does not have the approval of many scholars, is suspect by his own admission. "The absence of the definite article does not always indicate an early date as certain
analyses based on late poems, e.g., the Battle of Maldon, or even - 3h -
the Battle of Brunanburh, show the opposite....It seems that the
frequency of the article, generally in late works, is mainly a stylistic problem, whereas its lack in early poems is a matter of grammatical and
syntactical convention." The difference in his frequency figures
between the first section and the last, then, is as easily explained
by a difference in style as by a difference in date. Some of the
riddles may indeed be older than those of the first group, but there
is nothing conclusive in this study to prove them so, and certainly
nothing to prove that they all are older. - 35 -
FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER II
1. Adolf Ebert, "Die RStselpoesie der Angelsachsen," Berichte uber die Verhandlungen der koniglich sachsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig (Philol.-Hist. Classe, April, 1877), XXIX, 20-56.
2. REB, p. lxiii (cf. p. liii).
3. Georg Herzfeld, "Die RStsel des Exeterbuches und ihr Verfasser." Acta Germanica, Bd. II, Heft I, Berlin, 1890. li. Tupper's translation, REB, p. Ivi.
5. Archiv 106(1901), 390.
6. "Zeit, Heimat und Verfasser der Altenglischen Ratsel," Anglia 38(19110, 372.
7. ibid., p. 373.
8. REB, p. lxxv.
9. REB, p. lxxvi.
10. REB, p. lxxviii.
11. Benjamin Thorpe, ed., Codex Exoniensis: A Collection of Anglo-Saxon Poetry (London: William Pickering, 181+2), p. x.
12. For the purpose of this argument Dietrich includes 30b and 60 with the first section.
13. Tupper (REB p. xli) lists Riddle 38 not among those with'.direct debt, but with those which only "suggest direct borrowing."
Iii. Tupper finds only points of similarity between Riddle 8U and Aldhelm.
15. See Trautmann, "Quellen der Altenglischen Ratsel," Anglia 38(19110, 3U9-354 for the best summary.
16. REB, p. xxxviii.
17. REB, pp. xl-xliv.
18. Tupper REB, pp. li-liiij A.J. Wyatt, ed., Old English Riddles (Boston: D.C. Heath, 1912), pp. xxx-xxxi.
19. "Quellen der Altenglischen Ratsel," p. 353. - 36 -
20. Anglia 13, pp. 1-25.
21. A.J. Barnouw, Textkritische ITntersuchungen nach dem Gebrauch des Bestimmten Artikels und des Schwachen Adjectivs in der Altenglischen Poesie (Leiden: E.S. Brill. 1902). pp. 211-223.
22. Barnouw, p. 2lU.
23. Barnouw, p. 215-
24. REB, pp. lvi-lviii, lxxvii-lxxviii.
25. Kenneth Sisam, Studies in the History of Old English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1953), pp. 4-6, points out that the so-called Northumbrian genealogies, upon which Sievers had largely based this opinion, are not Northumbrian at all, but Mercian. "It is not a witness for e in Northumbrian usage; and there is nothing else to discount the testimonly of the Liber Vitae that the Northumbrian spelling in the early years of the ninth century
is Cyni-" (p. 6.).
26. REB, p. lvii.
27. REB, p. lviii;
28. REB, p. lxxviii. 29. Agop Hacikyan, A Linguistic and Literary Analysis of Old English Riddles (Montreal: Mario Casalini, 1966), pp. 16-25, 45-62.
30. "The frequency of total demonstratives per line is .15 in section one and ;039 (.0U7 [not counting mutilated lines]) in section three, and the frequency of the definite article in the first section os .12 and .032 (.042) in the third" (p. 19).
31. Madert, pp. 69, 128.
32. REB, p. 246.
33. p. 116.
34. Hacikyan, p. 19. - 37 -
CHAPTER III
SECTIONS OF THE TEXT AS SEPARATE UNITS
Despite the arguments of Tupper and the others for the complete, or almost complete, unity of the Exeter riddle collection, it seems to me that there is such a diversity of subjects, of approaches to themes and of quality of workmanship in these riddles that no argument for overall unity can be made convincing. Critical opinion since Tupper has indeed tended more and more toward the idea of wide diversity of
authorship and an abandonment of any notion of extensive organization
in the collection. I believe, however, that though this diversity is
certainly present, there is still some pattern of organization detectable
in the riddles. In this final chapter I wish to explore the possibility
that individual sections of the collection may be separate units.
Evidence for Distinct Groups in the Collection
Let us examine the point of view of the riddles. Three different
types appear:
A. The object speaks for itself in the first person.
B. The riddler speaks in the first person, talking about the object.
C. Neither the object nor the riddler speaks, and the whole matter is presented in the third person.
The riddles themselves may be classified accordingly: Type A Type B Type C Fragments 1 2 3 a 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 lit 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 2k 25 26 27 28 _29 30 31 32 33 3k 35 36 37 38 39 ho 1+1 1*2 1*3 hk U5 kS 1+7 1+8 1*9 50 51 52 53 51+ 55 56 57 58
(30bT 60 61 62 63 61+ 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 71+ 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 (82) 83 81+ 85 86 87 88 (89) [90 (Latin)] 91 92 93
95 (91+) - 39 -
The list1 may be readily organized into three parts (omitting for now 30b and 60). In the first part, from the beginning to about Riddle
30, nearly all the riddles are Type A. In the second part, following the first group up to Riddle 59, most are Type B, with several C, and
almost no A. The third part shows again a preponderance of Type A,
but with a few more B and C than in the first group. The most striking
thing about the list is the abrupt break in pattern after Riddle 59,
corresponding with the end of the first section in the MS. This would
seem to lend considerable support to the arguments of Dietrich and
Hacikyan (see Chapter II, who have claimed that more than just a
scribal separation in the text occurs here. Further, the division
in the section 1-59 seems to cut it almost exactly in half, breaking
at about Riddle 30. The result is a fairly symmetrical three-part
grouping.
What could account for this pattern? Evidence for a division
between Riddles 61-95 and the earlier ones comes as no real surprise,
because if there is to be a break in the collection at all, the
arrangement in the MS would lead one to expect it here. In light of
this new evidence, however, it would appear that not only are the
sections 1-59 and 61-95 distinct groups, but the first group is itself
really the sum of two parts. Many things can become distorted in
transmission, but something as basic as the point of view in the
presentation is certainly one of the least likely to be changed,
regardless of the embellishments, revisions or miscopyings of generations
of scribes. If it is assumed that writers, or even anthologists,
differ from each other in their subconscious preferences between points - Uo - of view, and that even miscellanies are quite likely as a result to show characteristic and discernable differences in the proportion of the different, points of view used, then one collection which more or less consistently prefers the first-person point of view would be distinguishable from, say, a second collection predominantly in the third person, even following garbled transmissions and wholesale revisions, providing the revisers did not change the point of view of a large number of pieces. - hi -
The Original Groupings
Partly because of the precedent of the 60-riddle collection of
Eusebius and partly because of desire for a neatly-fitting number, it is tempting to speculate that the first section of the riddles originally comprised an even 60 pieces, and that this was itself made up of two smaller collections of 30 riddles each. If the makeup of this supposed original form could be reconstructed, then it should be possible to locate, speculatively, the position of the break between the two smaller groups.
There appear to be 59 separate riddles in the first section (thus
Krapp and Dobbie), but because of textual problems in the MS there is some debate about the divisions between the first three, and thus about 2 3 the total. Trautmann and Erlemann take Riddles 1-3 as a single piece; Bauml i and Erika von Erhardt-Siebold 5 take 1 as a separate riddle, and
2-3 as one together. The scribe of this MS at least seems to have felt
Riddle 1 to be a separate piece. An end-mark follows it, and 2 begins with a capital letter. At the end of 2, however, there is no end-mark, and no capital to begin Riddle 3. The break occurs, incidentally, at the end of a page—Riddle 2 ends the bottom of the recto of folio 101, and Riddle 3 begins the verso. The inadvertent omission of a clear break at such a point seems highly unlikely (cf. Riddles U2-U3, where the break is omitted, but in mid-page).
To produce a total of 60, then, the number of riddles in the first
section must be increased by at least one (if Krapp and Dobbie are
followed), but more likely two or even three (following Trautmann and - U2 -
Erlemann). Where are these riddles to come from? There is only one obvious hiatus in the MS in the section 1-59. Riddle i+0 breaks off in mid-sentence at the end of folio 111 , and Riddle Ul, which begins the new folio, has no opening. Clearly at least one folio has dropped from the text at this point. Now the average number of verse lines per folio side in the MS in this section of the riddles is 33 1/3.
The total number of verse lines missing if one folio (two sides) has dropped out, then, would be about 67. Fortunately, the break occurs in one of the only two riddles of the entire collection which are direct translations from a known source. It should be possible, then, to calculate the approximate number of lines of verse which have been lost from Riddle UO, assuming a complete translation was made.
Tupper^ sees the piece as having been the product, in its present state, of two translators. The first, A, who was probably also the translator of the other Aldhelm riddle, 35, in nearly every case carefully expanded each line of Latin into two of Anglo-Saxon. The result is 79 Old English lines from U3 of Latin. Following line 79, though, Tupper finds the method, and in his opinion the translator, to change. The translation in the later part of the riddle does not attempt to follow this two-for-one pattern, and assessment is not at all helped by the fact that the B translator evidently had as his model a text with a different ordering of ideas than that in the extant version. B renders the six lines of Aldhelm 61-66 as 16 of Anglo-
Saxon (liO82-97), and the seven of 'De Creatura* iili-50 as 10 (UO98-107).
The total, however, is 26 of the vernacular for 13 of the Latin, still - U3 - about two for one. If lines $1-60 and 67-83 of Aldhelm still remain to be dealt with, a total of 27 lines, then about 5U might be expected 7 to be missing from the Exeter text. Comparing this to the estimate of 67 lines missing by the page calculation, I conclude that the 13 or so excess lines are a likely number to be missing from the beginning of Riddle Ijl, which, in its rather leisurely pace, has not really
supplied much information by the end of its nine surviving lines.
We have accounted for the missing folio, then, but still have not accounted for any more riddles. The only other place where material
could have dropped out of the present MS is between folios 105 and 106,
where Riddle 20 ends the verso of 105, and a new piece, 21, begins with
a capital letter at the top of the new folio. Though Riddle 20 could
quite possibly be complete—"There is nothing in the MS to indicate
any lacuna here," Wyatt declares —there is no end-mark at the end v 9 of 105 • Most scholars feel that there is something missing. Forster,
in his collation of the MS in The Exeter Book of Old English Poetry,1^
felt that a leaf had dropped out at this point. As the missing page
would comprise the other two faces of the folio missing between 111
and 112 (Riddle kO), the possiblility is an attractive one. The
gathering containing folios 106-111, gathering XIV in Fflrster's
numbering, is composed of only six folios, two less—or one folded
sheet less—than the usual eight in most of the other gatherings (see
Figure 1). This missing folio, then, would provide a further 67 or
so verse lines. Judging from the general length of riddles in the
collection, it is unlikely that a single riddle would be this long. - hh -
Rid. 20 Rid. U0 I , I X • 106 • 107 • 108 109 • 110 • 111 • X I i—'ii Gathering XIV
Resignation' Rid. 73
Gathering XVI (F = fold)
Rid. 71^-71* Rid. 75 Rid. 95
' 1 , 1 126 + 127 * 128 129 * 130 l . ,' 1 ' t Gathering XVII
Figure 1
FSrster's Collation of Gatherings XIV, XVI and XVII (EBOEP, p. 59)
a) 126 + X + 127 • 128 I 129 * 130
b) 126 • 127 ' 128 I 129 • 130 * X : 1 • ' • 1 : Figure 2
Possible Loss from Gathering XVII Apart from the two long pieces in the first section—UO (107 lines) and 3 (7k lines) or 2-3 (89 lines)—the longest are Riddles 15, 26 and
39, each with 29 lines. (In the second section only one riddle approaches this length, No. 8U, which has 56 lines,) As two riddles of about 33 lines each the pieces would still be longish, but more reasonable in length. But if the 67 lines were divided into three poems averaging
22 lines or so each, though still greater than average in length for the section,^" the numbers would come quite within the range of possibility. There are half a dozen riddles of about this length or
a little more in the first section.
Thus, if the 'storm* riddles are counted as two and not three
pieces (1, 2-3), or especially if they are considered all as a single
piece, it is quite possible that there might have been originally an
even 60 riddles in this section of the MS. Scribal alterations by
accident or design in earlier manuscriptal versions may, of course,
have had a hand in changing the number of pieces, but there is no way
to tell. Thus if the division between the first group (henceforth to
be called Group I) and the second (Group II) is to be made at the
mid-point of the original number, dividing the first section into an 12
originally complete pair of 30-riddle groups, it should be placed
between Riddles 29 and 30.
If the first section could originally have comprised 60 riddles,
like Eusebius's collection, could the compiler(s) of the last part,
61-95, have been trying, like Tatwine, to add another UO to bring
the total to 100? FSrster felt that there is nothing to indicate that - h6 - gatherings XVI and XVII, which contain these riddles, ever contained more folios than they now have, i.e. seven and five respectively.
There is, however, one place in gathering XVII where internal loss could possibly have occurred on the evidence of the text. This is between folios 126 (ends with Riddle 74) and 127 (begins with 75), though the possibility here seems slight. It would after all be rather unlikely that the missing riddles would begin exactly at the beginning of the folio and end exactly at the end of it. Forster reconstructs gathering XVII (the backs of the sheets are now worn away, so the gathering in its 1933 condition was composed only of five single leaves glued together) as having originally comprised two folded sheets, fols. 127-130 and 128-129, and a single leaf, fol. 126. This possible break does come, then, at a place where the loss of a single leaf is a possibility, as two single sheets—fol. 126 and the missing one (see Figure 2a)—would make the beginning of the gathering similar to the beginning of gathering XVI. If there is any loss, though, it is much more reasonable to suppose that it might have occurred at the end of the collection. Riddle 95 ends at the bottom of the last folio, with all the usual number of folio lines completed (22 in this part of the MS, so there is nothing to indicate conclusively, despite Forster's contrary opinion, that this was actually the original end of the book.
Some leaves, or even a gathering or more, might have been lost from 13 the end, as certainly was the case at the beginning, and Fol. 126 may not in fact have been a single leaf, but only the first half of a folded sheet, with a missing leaf possibly providing the second half - 1+7 -
(Figure 2b). Judging from the harsh treatment the first few pages of the Exeter Book have received over the years, the likelihood seems actually rather small that all the pages should have been retained at the end. The possibility does exist, then, though certainly it is much more hypothetical than for the first section, that some material has been lost, and that the missing parts could have brought the final group to an even 1+0.
But what of the minor group, 30b and 60? Do these two riddles belong to the first section, to the last, or are they independent of both groups? As 30b is merely another copy of 30, with only minor variations, it has undoubtedly been taken from the same original as the earlier one. Because of the repetition it does not seem likely that 30b is merely a misplaced member of the first section. However, if Riddle 30 was originally the first riddle of Group II, then 30b could have resulted from an accidental mis-start of this group later in the MS. Such an explanation does not solve the mystery of the presence of Riddle 60, though. The best guess seems to be that (if it is a riddle at all, and not just the beginning of the "Husband;'s
Message"^) it is independent of the grouped riddles, and that it found its way into the MS at this point only because it was among miscellaneous short material, and somewhat resembled the "Husband's
Message." - 48 -
Opening and Closing Formulas, and Three Adverbs
Some support for this pattern of riddle groupings can be found by examining the opening and closing formulas. Dietrich, in his first article, attempted to use the similarity and frequency of opening and closing formulas in the section "l"-i>9 as evidence for unity of author• ship. In contrast, he said, the final section has few of these formulas, with much less variety than in the first section, and what formulas do appear are more clumsily handled. Dietrich's study was, however, not really comprehensive enough to be considered valid, and though it did point out a difference between the last section and the first in the frequency and in the type of formulas used, it was rightly rejected by Tupper. A more systematic examination, though, not only substantiates
Dietrich's claims, but provides positive evidence for the three-group theory.
First let us examine the formulas themselves. A complete list is presented in Appendix C. Certainly the greatest impediment to! making any sort of grouping of the riddles on the basis of these expressions is their diversity. Some, though they are without doubt formulaic, appear only a few times in the collection. Others—for example raed hwaet ic maene in 61 and saga hwaet ic hatte in 62—appear repeated in variations dissimilar enough to make it doubtful whether they are
12-15- the same formulas or different ones. Yet others, such as 2 , saga boncol mon hwa mec bregde of brimes faebmum bonne streamas eft stille weorbaS yba gebwaere be mec aer wrugon though clearly drawing their substance from traditional formulas, - h9 - are so altered for originality by the poet that they can no longer be rightly called formulaic. And, for any individual case of common formula use, the rebuttal that the similarity is due merely to common tradition is irrefutable. Yet, because the three groups of riddles are roughly equivalent in size—27 (considering Riddles 1-3 as one) riddles extant in Group I, 30 in Group II and 35? in the third group
(Group III)—some evidence may be gained from an examination of the distribution of the opening and closing formulas over the collection.
Much of the data in Tables II and III appears to support the claim for three major divisions in the text. The three most fundamental tests, A, B and C, should be examined first. A shows a clear division between the three groups: the frequency of opening formulas is more than twice as great in Group II as in either of the other groups.
Test B, the distribution of closing formulas, is not as conclusive, but does seem to indicate a heavier incidence in Group I than in the others, with the frequency in II and III being more or less the same.
It is possibly significant to note here with Tupper the long succession of riddles (all in Group I, incidentally) with no opening formula, 1-17, though I think the ic seah of 13 is a formula. Another 18 successive riddles, h.2-59 (all in Group II), have no conventionalized closing.^
The figures from Test C, absence of both opening and closing formulas, again show a difference between the three groups, with the frequency in Group II only about half as great as 'in>Gfoup III.
Individual formulas are not distributed evenly over the collection, but usually appear concentrated in a single group. Of the 12 instances of D, ic seah, eight range across Group II, whereas only two each are Group-I Group II -t--t- -1 • j i 12113 1 .Group,111 ,' , ; Test 1 2 1 3 lli !5 6 7 8 19 10111 i Hi,lyl6l7 18J19 20 21 22 23 2lr2$i26 27!28 29 3P 31 33 3L35 56 |37j38 39 1*0 frl 1*2, 1*3 1*1* U5 jl*6 jl*7 [1*8 ;U9 i5o 51,52 J53 jft & £6 57 58 j59 |60 pi 62 63 61* ;65 —f.. 66 ^7 ! 72 j 73 j 7li j 75 j 76 j 77 j 78' 79 80 8X 8218^181, i R Indicates the test is not applicable As 1-2-3 are likely all one riddle, Counted as one for this test, though raed hwaet ic maene may because of the fragmentary condition 1 and 3 should only be counted as Riddle 36 actually contains two closing be of Type L or N, but formulas. Though damaged, the opening of of the MS (also the Latin riddle, 90). one using; a closing formula. See more likely is a single 82 was probably of the wiht is also Riddlle 36. They are both example of a further wraetlic type. —— counted, Ihowever, for the later type. tests. Table II Distribution of Opening and Closing Formulas - 51 - Frequency of Opening and Closing Formulas Test A. Opening Formulas Test B. Closing Formulas Group I II III possible 27 29 33 possible 26 29 28 occurred 8 19 9 occurred 11 6 8 frequency .30 .66 .27 frequency .U2 .21 .29 Test C. No Formulas possible 26 28 27 occurred 10 7 13 frequency .38 .25 «U8 Opening Formulas: Closing Formulas: D. occurred 2 8 2 L. occurred 7 2 frequency .07 .28 .06 frequency .27 .07 E. occurred 15 3 M. occurred 1 5 frequency .OU .17 .09 frequency .Ok .17 F. occurred 5 - - N. occurred h frequency .18 - frequency .15 G. occurred - 3 Sample calculation: frequency - .10 Test D, Group I: H. occurred -2 1 frequency - .07 .03 possible to occur: 27 actually occurred: 2 frequency =2y = -07 Table III - 52 - . found in Groups I and III. The related formula E, ic wiht geseah, shows a similar distribution, with five of the nine occurrences in the middle group, of which four are clustered. Of the five cases of F, ic eom wunderlicu wiht, however, all occur in a clump in Group I. Formulas G and H do not really occur often enough to provide reliable information, but all three cases of G, ic wat, appear in Group II. The closing formula saga hwaet ic hatte and its variants, L, are frequently seen in the first and last groups (seven times in Group I and six times in Group III), but only twice in Group II. Conversely, the elaborate formula M, hwaet seo wiht sy, which incorporates all the micel is to hycganne... type, is found five times in the middle group, but only once each in the others. Though N, frige hwaet ic hatte, occurs in only four riddles in the collection, all four are in Group I. Of the remaining individual opening and closing formulas, none appears often enough for any valid conclusion to be made. An examination of the distribution of the adverbs hwilum, oft and nu also demonstrates the three-part division, as shown in Table IV. Remarkably often these words appear at the beginning of a half-line. 17 Indeed, of the 100 times hwilum begins a half-line in all Old English poetry, fully 5\ of them are in the Exeter riddles I Hwilum in fact appears only seven times in the riddles when it does not begin a half- line. Hwilum, oft and nu frequently begin a sentence or a syntactical unit, and so attain often an almost rhetorical function, directing the movement of the poem at a critical point, or sometimes, especially in the case of hwilum, setting up a parallelism within the riddle which may even serve as its dominant logic. Occasionally in Group I - 53 - Occurrence of Hwilum, Oft and Nu Adverb Begins Half-Line: Total by Total by- Group I Group II Group III riddles occurrence 2 ii9 61 I 10 I 37 3 (x8) 57 62 (x2) 6 (x2) 63 II 2 II 2 7 73 12 (x5) 80 III 10 III 15.' m (xio) 83 22 17 85 20 89 2h (x7) 91 27 93 (x5) oft: ii 30 (ful 61 I 5 7 5 oft, and 63 - 6 30b) 72 (x2) II k ii 16 iili 77 20 (x3) U9 78 III 10 12 53 80 19 23 8ii (x2) 88 (ful oft) 91 93 nu: Hi UO (x2) 71 I 3 3 16 li2# 73 27 53 77 II H 5 55* 83 88 (x2) III 8 10 92 IE 93 (x2) 95 * introduces closing Table IV, i - 5U - Scribal Point Precedes Adverb Total by Total by hwilum: Group I Group II Group III riddles occurrence 2 73 I Mi I 1U 3 (x3) 85 LU (x3) 89 II - II - 2k (x7) 91 (25) 93 (x3) III 5 III _7 9 21 oft: 20 93 I II III 1 1 2 2 nu: 26 73 I 27 88 93 II III 3 3 5 5 Total Occurrence of Adverb, All Positions I II III Total hwilum: 39 2 19 60 oft: 8 7 15 30 nu: 3 6 11 20 Table IV, ii hwilum is found in profusion in such a role: five times in the 15 lines of Riddle 12, 10 times in the 19 lines of Riddle LU and seven times in only 10 lines in Riddle 2U. Though little is known about the Old English scribal practice of pointing, which appears to have served as a sort of punctuation, this kind of rhetorical importance, especially of hwilum, is perhaps emphasized by the fact that in two-fifths (21 of 5U) of the cases in which hwilum begins a half-line, and even once (25^, and here hwilum may have been placed at the end of the b-line only because of syntactical twisting to accommodate the alliteration) when it does not, it is preceded by a scribal point. In Riddle 2U all seven cases of hwilum are set off this way. Though this phenomenon does not seem to apply as much to oft (only in two of 23 cases where oft begins the half-line), oft has been chosen as the opening word in four of the riddles, 16, 61, 63 and 78. A scribal point precedes nu in five of 18 cases in which it begins the half-line, and remarkably in three of these cases, 27, 88 and 93, nu is also capitalized. This occurs at the beginning of the a^lihe in 88^ and 93^^, but at the beginning of the b-line in 27^. In 88^ the scribe even goes so far as to precede the capitalized Nu with two points. A difference in the frequency of employment of these adverbs between the three groups is easily seen in Table IV. Of the 5U places in 22 riddles where hwilum begins the half-line, the great majority, 37, are found in Group I. Fifteen appear in Group III, but hwilum is seen only twice in any position in all of Group II. Though the usage is heavier in Group I, hwilum occurs in 10 riddles in both the first and last groups. The figures for oft and nu do not indicate as much difference between the first two groups as those for hwilum, but definitely show a far heavier usage, twice that for any other group, in Group III. Though the difference in the frequency of occurrence of scribal points preceding hwilum, oft and nu is perhaps not great enough for a strong indication, it is notable that though there are 28 examples of it in Groups I and III, this arrangement is never seen in Group II. - 57 - The Relationship Between the Groups If the riddle collection is made up of three distinct parts, can anything be determined about the relationship between the groups? Actually, there seems to be far less difference between the riddles of Groups I and II than between those of the third group and the others. Of course Group III stands alone at the end of the MS, whereas Groups I and II are presented together, but there are other reasons for making such a judgement. Stylistically, though there is nothing in Group II to match the magic of the magnificent 'storm' series which opens the first group, and though there is nothing in Group I to equal the sustained dullness of Riddle UO, the fluctuations in quality between the riddles of the first two groups are by no means the wide variations found in Group III. Despite whatever differences there may be between the riddles of the two earlier groups, there is still in every case an attempt made to produce a literary creation offering the listener or reader a certain minimum standard of literary adornment. In several riddles of the last group, however, this is not the case. Riddles 68 and 69 (Tupper and Mackie put them together as a single poem, but the point holds nonetheless), 75, 76 and 79 (though it may be just a mis-start of the following riddle) are bald enigmas even by folk-riddle standards, 18 and if they are in fact, as Trautmann would have us believe, not 19 folk but literary pieces (and even Tupper's criteria would seem to admit Riddle 75 to be literary because of its runes), then they are very crude pieces indeed. Yet, on the other end of the scale, a few of the riddles, such as 88, 93 'horn' and Qk 'water,' come close at - 58 - times to the best in the earlier groups. Such a wide divergence in riddle quality in the third group can only lead me to conclude that this group, at least, is a very miscellaneous collection containing the work of a number of poets of a broad range of abilities. As the overall differences between Groups I and II are not great—indeed no one has before found reason to suggest a firm division of any kind in Riddles 1-59—it is most profitable to study the relationship of the riddles of the last group to those of the earlier parts. Group III opens with a trio of 'obscene' riddles, but though these do have a number of expressions in common with earlier 'obscene' pieces, as well as with each other, it would perhaps be incautious to conclude that any definite connections exist, because of the great possibility of independent use of the same traditional material in this type of riddle. However, the following similarities should be 8 9 * 8 noted: 61 on nearo fegde, 25 fegeo mec on faesten, 62 on nearo 9 5 5 nathwaer; 61 ruwes nathwaet, 25 neoban run nathwaer, 5U stibes 5 8 7 nathwaet; 63 tillic esne, Sh tillic esne; 63 wyrceS his willa[nj, 5U^ worhte his willan. Immediately following these is another series, five riddles this time, all with demonstrable connections with earlier pieces. Riddle 6h is a runic 'hunt1 riddle, about which Krapp and Dobbie remark: "Regardless how we interpret the runes in detail, it is clear that 20 this riddle is a companion to Riddle 19." Next is the 'onion' riddle, 65, which is merely a non-salacious version of its 'obscene' 21 counterpart. In both, as Tupper points out, the biter of the onion is seen as the destroyer. As well, both enigmas share the 'bite only - 59 - t the biter' idea which originates with Symphosius 1+1+: 65 monnan ic ne 2-3 bite nymppe he me bite, 25 naengum scebbe / burgsittendra nymbe 2-3 bonum anum; the attack on the head: 65 aeghwa mec reafa&...ond min heafod scireb, 25 reafa5 min heafod; and the confinement of the subject: 65^ hafaS mec on headre, 25^ fege5 mec on faesten. Riddle 66, as mentioned earlier, is nothing but a re-working of Riddle 1+0. "It owes nothing to Aldhelm's De Creatura directly," Tupper remarks, "but is a very free reshaping of some of the material furnished by the second hand in 1+1,„[K-D 1+0') 82f."22 The damaged riddle 67, 'Bible,' is only a new treatment of the subject of 26, and shares with it at least one parallel: 67 golde gegierwed, 26 gierede mec mid golde. In addition the wisdom and teaching of the book appear in both, though handled in different ways: 67^ [...} wearS / leoda lareow, 26"^ gif min bearn wera bruean willa3 hy beo8 by gesundran ond by sigefaestran heortum by hwaetran ond by hygeblibran ferbe by frodan...etc. The last riddle in the series is 68, which is virtually identical to the first two lines of Riddle 36. In 36, however, the lines are only an opening formula, so it is not at all clear what to make of their reoccurrence here as a complete poem. Many scholars have taken 68 and the next riddle, which is only one line long, as one poem together, but the objections of Krapp and Dobbie that "there is nothing in the 23 texts of the two riddles which would justify us in associationg them" seems a sound judgement. The elevation of the last word of 68 in the MS (fol. 125V) for economy of space would seem to indicate strongly that the scribe of this MS, at least, saw no connection at all between - 60 - the two. Beyond this series there are still further connections between Group III riddles and earlier ones. The 'ox' riddle 72 has in common with its two predecessors 12 and 38 the association of its subject with the swarthy slave: 72^ swearturn hyrde, 7212 mearcpapas walas, 12^ Q swearte wealas, 12 wonfeax wale, and its source of nourishment in youth: 72 oft ic feower teah / swaese broper, 38 feower wellan. Related to the drinking of the young ox is the provision of milk by the adult in 12^ ^, hwilum ic deorum drincan selle / beorn[e] of 8 5 bosme. Note the verbal similarity between 72 drincan sealde and 12 drincan selle. Even closer is the similarity between the 'bellows' riddles 87 and 37, which at the beginning are almost doublets: Ic seah wundorlice wiht wombe haefde micle prypum geprungne pegn folgade ^ _ maegenstrong ond mundrof (87 ) Ic pa wihte geseah wombe waes on hindan bripum aprunten pegn folgade , maegenrofa man (371"3) The fragment 89 also appears to have been very closely related to these two. Though little is left of it, the parallels in two elements 2 li are obvious: wombe haefde f...] 89 , [...] on hindan 89 . Riddle 91 ('key'), like 65, is a non-salacious treatment of the subject of an earlier 'obscene' piece, though it is not nearly as closely related to kh as 65 is to 25. One point in common should be noted, however: 5 2-3 91 hearde wi5 heardum hindan byrel, hh ~ foran is byrel / bi& stiS ond heard. And the fragmentary Riddle 9k is, with little doubt, another 'creation' riddle, since it employs the same comparative \- technique (smaller than..., higher than..., etc.) as kO and 67, and - 61 - shares some of their motives: 9k hyrre bonne heofon, kO hyrre ic 6 3 3 eom heofone, 67 heofonas oferstige; 9k glaedre bonne sunne, 67 6 76 swiftre bonne sunne; and possibly 9k leohtre bonne w £... ] , kO leohtre ic eom micle bonne bes lytla wyrm, though the damaged word in 9k^ cannot have been wyrm, as there are no descending strokes on the next four letters (the tops are obliterated by a hole in the MS) after w. Finally, Paddle 95, despite its confusion arid lack of an adequate solution, has much in common with the 'body and soul' riddle, 1+3. Indeed Trautmann solves^it, though unconvincingly, in his edition^ as 'der Geist.' Most obvious of course are the opening half-lines, which differ only in point of view: 95^~ Ic eom indryhten, k3^ Ic wat indryhtne. Also, the subject's wide acquaintance arid frequent sojourns 2 2 with the rich and lowly in 95 are paralleled in k3 , where the soul is a guest in the courts. The journey of the soul, k3^, is matched by the wide travels of the subject in 95 . The conditional wiste ond i 8 blisse which the soul may win under favorable circumstances in k3 5-6 may even shed some light on the passage 95 gif ic habban sceal / blaed in burgum obbe beorhtne god, which has caused many a headache to riddle scholars. All of the above parallels have been between riddles related by subject (or, in the case of the 'obscene' riddles, by genre) to earlier ones. Even more striking, however, are three parallels between riddles which seem otherwise completely unrelated. Most peculiar is the line haebbe me on bosme baet on bearwe geweox, 80^. The expression paet on bearwe geweox does not, to my ear at least, have the well-worn and 2 familiar ring of the traditional formula. Only by reference to 27 -62 - brungen of bearwum does it become plain that what the horn of 80 holds in its bosom is mead, which is made from honey from the woods, hills, valleys and downs of 27. Much the same relationship is found between 81^ ^ aglac dreoge / baer mec wegeS se be wudu hrere9 and 1^~^° bonne ic wudu hrere / bearwas bledhwate beamas fylle, and between 921 Ic waes brunra beot beam on holte and UO1^^ amaested swin / bearg bellende Cbe] on bocwuda / won wrotende wynnum lifde. Here too the extremely cryptic circumlocutions of the later riddles are explained by passages from earlier riddles. In some of the related riddles above, the parallels are limited to only a half-line or two; in others they are more extensive. But in those where the similarity is greatest—65-25, 66-UO, 68-36, 87-37, 9U-U0-66—the parallels seem strong enough to eliminate any likelihood of them being caused merly by chance or by the use of traditional expression. Tupper and other scholars have seen such connections as indications of unity of authorship (Tupper uses the word 'homogeneity,' as he finds a few of the riddles to be different), but the overall differences between Group III and the other two groups, discussed earlier in this chapter, would seem to discourage this explanation. The three peculiar parallels between unrelated riddles—80-27, 81-1, 92—Lj.0—however, appear to suggest some sort of dependence of Group III on the earlier riddles. In these three examples, at least, it does not seem likely that the later passages would have been written without the prior existence and influence of the earlier ones. Parallel passages with this kind of relationship could easily have occurred in a situation in which a literary work had become well-loved and thoroughly - 63 - known to a number of people. The lifting of passages from mutually familiar pieces of literature for use in argument and witty conversation has always been common practice not only among scholars but among literate people generally. Could not such a practice also have been employed for enigmatic purposes? If such a dependence exists between these three pairs of riddles, then we might reasonably conclude that the writers of the third group had an intimate knowledge of the first two groups. If this possibility is considered, then some of the other links between Group III riddles and earlier ones can reasonably be explained. Riddles 66 and 9h may be new riddles modelled on Riddle 1*0. Riddle 87 could similarly have been begun in imitation of 37 (the first five half-lines are very close), with a subsequent drift into independence as the riddle progressed. Riddle 95, though it probably does not share the same solution as h3, may have been modelled on it as a beginning, much the same as 87-37, but with the motives used for a purpose now obscured by garbling. Riddles 6U, 65, 67, 68, 72 and 91 fall into place as less closely related, but similar cases. An assumption that at least some of the riddles in Group III are the products of imitation of Group I and II riddles, done by a number of authors, though not a conventional one, is nonetheless in keeping 25 with known 'practice among'.the Anglo-Saxons. F.H. Whitman has pointed out that Latin enigmas appear to have been regularly used for the instruction of students in grammar during this period, and that Aldhelm himself seems to have considered his riddles "an elementary exercise before the undertaking of a more important task....Coming where they - 6k - do, in his Epistle to Aldfrid, which includes a dialogue on metrics, it seems likely that they were intended to serve as illustrations 26 of the theoretical principles which he had exhibited in the dialogue." Whitman also notes that Latin riddles are often found gathered with material pertaining to grammatical studies, and that interlinear glosses in the MS containing the riddles of Tatwine, Aldhelm and Symphosius "seem to indicate that the manuscript was once used by a master for 27 the teaching of rudimentary Latin." If riddles were used as creative exercises in Latin and as models in the teaching of Latin composition, then it seems likely that they would have been employed for grammatical purposes in the vernacular as well. It is conceivable, therefore, that Group III is actually a collection of the efforts of a number of student writers, some riddles of which are imitations of Group I and II enigmas, and others perhaps original compositions or imitations of other riddles now lost, all anthologized with a few more accomplished pieces (81*, 88, 93), which may themselves be imitations. Some older riddles may be included, but the dearth of demonstratives and definite articles which Hacikyan points out in all of Group III, if taken as a'stylistic feature rather than as evidence for dating (see Chapter II), would indicate a certain uniformity of usage easily explainable as the product of a common overriding style—perhaps one imposed by a grammar master. Such imitation by a number of authors would also provide a credible explanation for the presence of one, two and even three treatments in Group III of single subjects dealt with in earlier parts of the collection: two 'creation' riddles, 66, 9U(iiO), one "Bible' riddle, - 65 - 67(26), one »ox" riddle, 72(12, 38), three 'horn' riddles, 80, 88 arid 93(Hi), probably two 'bellows' riddles, 87, 89(37), and the two non-salacious'treatments, 65(25) arid 91(U0, of earlier 'obscene pieces. - 66 - FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER III 1. I have placed Riddle 61 in Type A and 86 in Type C, though in each case classification is difficult. In 61, though the whole riddle is obviously of the A type, the formulaic tag raed hwaet ic maene might seem to be more appropriate to a B-type riddle if ic is taken as the riddler (as in Baum's translation). More likely the original wording was similar to the tag on the following piece, saga hwaet ic hatte, but with raed replacing saga because an r-alliterator was needed. Of course, if maene is taken (as in Mackie's translation) to mean 'signify,' the problem disappears. In Riddle 86 an error in transmission has resulted in an A-type tag being appended to a C-type riddle. Though Riddle 1*1 is incomplete due to a break in the MS between folios 111b and 112a it has been placed in Type C, as there is nothing to suggest any first-person forms were included in the missing part. Riddle 67 is placed in Type B, as both the beginning and the ending seem to demand it. The section though, seems to have the object speaking. Mackie translates the passage as a quoted speech of the object, told by the riddler. This interpretation would seem to solve the problem, and the riddle would remain Type B. Fragment 78, though little sense can be made of what is left of it, is obviously Type A. Three fragments were deemed too doubtful for classification. No. 82 is probably C, though it could possibly be B. No. 88 is likely of the B type, but missing the ic seah opener. Of No. 9k there is no evidence for classification left, but Mackie's reconstruction would make it an A. 2. "Die AuflBsungen der altenglischen RStsel," Anglia Beiblatt 5(1916), 1*6, and in his edition, pp. 1-1*- 3. E. Erlemann, "Zu den altenglischen RStseln," Archiv 111(1903), 1*9-63. 1*. Paull F. Baum, trans., Anglo-Saxon Riddles of the Exeter Book (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1963), pp. 3-7. 5. "The Old English Storm Riddles," PMLA 61*(19l*9), 181*-188. 6. REB, pp. 162-161*. 7. The obvious fact that this would produce a very long riddle indeed (161 lines or so, whereas the next longest possible would be the combined 'storm' riddles 1-2-3 of 109 lines) need not be terribly alarming, as Aldhelm's original itself is five times as long as any of his others. 8. p. 16. 9. Tupper, REB, pp. xcvi, 16; Krapp and Dobbie, p. 191; Baum, p. 1*2. 10. p. 59. - 67 - 11. The average number of lines per riddle in the first section (1-59) is Hi, taken over 53 riddles. Those not counted were 1-3, as they are under dispute here; 18, as there is clearly a hiatus in it; 20, which may be a fragment; and Ul, which has no beginning. If UO is omitted because of its unusual length, the adjusted average is I2f- lines per riddle. 12. FOrster's suggestion that a further single leaf may have been lost between fols. 111-112 should not endanger this placement of the division, as he advances it only as a possibility. If just two leaves are indeed missing, and I think my arguments show that such an assumption is reasonable (as far as can be judged from this single version of the riddles, at least), then the likelihood is much stronger, due to the apparent break in the text, that the second leaf has fallen out between fols. 105-106 rather than between 111-112. 13. cf. Cook, p. xiv. lU- See F.A. Blackburn, "The Husband's Message and the Accompanying Riddles of the Exeter Book," JEGP 3(1900), 1-3; R.W.V. Elliott, "Runes in the Husband's Message," JEGP 5U(1955), 1-8. 15. REB, p. lxv. 16. Tupper lists U2, 55, 57 and 59 as closing with a formula, but I disagree. See Appendix C, closing formula differences. 17. I am indebted to F.H. Whitman for leading me to this information. 18. "Quellen der Altenglischen Ratsel," p. 353. 19. REB, p. lxxxv. 20. p. 368. 21. REB, p. 123. 22. REB, p. 207. 23. p. 369. 2U. Die Altenglischen Ratsel (New York: G.E. Stechert, 1915), p. 1U0. 25. F.H. Whitman, "Medieval Riddling: Factors Underlying its Development," Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 71(1970), 177-185. 26. Whitman, p. 181. 27. ibid. - 68 - The reappearance in Riddle 93 of the unusually heavy use of hwilum clauses of Riddle lij. (hwilum also appears twice in 80, though only once at the beginning of a half-line) should be pointed out as further evidence for a connection between the 'horn' riddles of Group III and the earlier one. - 69 - CONCLUSION Opinion about the unity of the Exeter Book riddles has been divided. Earlier scholars generally felt the collection was a unified whole, but since the decline of the Cynewulfian authorship theory, such a view has fallen into disfavor. Most modern critics have seen the collection as a miscellany with no overall plan or unity. Scholars who have proposed block divisions in the text have made the logical suggestion that only one break occurs (besides the separation of 30b and 60 from the rest), and that that is at the textual break following Riddle 59. The distribution of points of view in the riddles, however, establishes a three-part structure (excluding 30b and 60) in the text of the riddles. One break predictably occurs after Riddle 59, but an earlier break also appears, one which cuts the section 1-59 more or less in half. If it can be assumed that this section of the riddles once totalled 60 (like the collection of Eusebius) and that the break in it was between two originally equal groups of 30, then the mid-break may be tentatively located between Riddles 29 and 30. This calculation assumes the loss of one sheet which would have provided missing folios between Fols. 105-106 and between 111-112, though it is necessarily confined to assumptions of loss only from this MS, and not from preceding ones. Examination of the distribution of opening and closing formulas over the collection, and of the distribution of the adverbs hwilum, oft and nu, seem to indicate support for this three-part grouping. Riddle 30b could be seen as merely a mis-start of the second group of - 70 - riddles (30-59) at a point later in the MS. Riddle 60 probably follows only because of its similarity to the "Husband's Message." Parallels between the first two groups of riddles do not afford any good opportunities for conclusions about their relationship, but some striking points in common between Group III and the first two groups appear to suggest that Group III is to some extent based on Groups I and II, and that a number of the later riddles may have been modelled on earlier ones. The diversity in quality between the riddles of Group III also suggest a number of authors rather than one. It is possible that Group III may be an anthology containing in part the work of grammar students, as the writing of riddles as composition exercises and the use of them as examples for study and imitation appears to have been common practice during the Anglo-Saxon period. - 71 - LIST OF WORKS CONSULTED Alexander, Michael. The Literature of the Anglo-Saxons. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 19U9. Barnouw, Adrian Jacob. Textkritische Untersuchungen nach dem Gebrauch des Bestimmten Artikels und des Schwachen Adjectivs in der Altenglischen Poesie. Leiden: E.S. Brill, 1902. Baum, Paull F., trans. Anglo-Saxon Riddles of the Exeter Book. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1963. Benson, Larry D. "The Literary Character of Anglo-Saxon Formulaic Poetry." PMLA 81(1966), 33U-3U1. Bosworth, Joseph. An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. Edited and enlarged by T. Northcote Toller. London: Oxford University Press, 195U. Bradley, Henry. Review of Morley's English Writers, vol. II. Acadamy 33(1888), 197-198. Brooke, Stopford A. The History of Early English Literature. London: Macmillan, 1892, vol. I. Blackburn, F.A. "The Husband's Message and the Accompanying Riddles of the Exeter Book." JEGP 3(1900), 1-13. Brown, Carleton F. "The Autobiographical Element in the Cynewulfian Rune Passages." Englische Studien 38(1907), 196-233. Cassidy, Frederic G. "How Free was the Anglo-Saxon Scop?" Franciplegius: Medieval and Linguistic Studies in Honor of Francis Peabody Magoun, Jr. ed. Jess B. Bessinger, Jr. and Robert P. Creed. New York: New York University Press, 1965, 75-85. Chambers, R.W., Max Ftfrster and Robin Flower, eds. The Exeter Book of Old English Poetry. London: Lund, Humphries and Co., 1933. Conybeare, John J., ed. Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry. London: Harding and Lepard, l82o~! Cook, Albert S., ed. Christ of Cynewulf. Boston: Ginn and Co., 1900. Courthope, W.J. A History of English Poetry. London: Macmillan, 1895, vol. I. Das, Satyendra Kumar. Cynewulf and the Cynewulf Canon. Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 19U2. ' - 72 - Dubois, Marguerite-Marie. Les Elements Latins dans la Poesie Religieuse ,, de Cynewulf. Paris: Librairie E. Droz, 19^3. ,, Dietrich, Franz. .''Die Rathsel des Exeterbuchs: Wurdung, LcJsung und f Herstellung." Zeitschrift fur deutsches Alterthum 11(1857) uu8-u90. . "Die RSthsel des Exeterbuchs: Verfasser, Weitere Losungen." 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Krapp, George Philip, and Elliott van Kirk Dobbie, eds. The Exeter Book. New York: Columbia University Press, 1936. Lawrence, W.W. "The First Riddle of Cynewulf." PMLA 17(1902), 21*7-261. Lichtenheld, A. "Das schwache Adjectiv im Angelsachsisch." Zeitschrift fur Deutsches Alterthum 16(1873), 325-393. Mackie, W.S., ed. The Exeter Book Part II: Poems IX XXXII. EETS os. No. 19l*. London: Oxford University Press, 1931*. Mather, F.J. "The Cynewulfian Question from a Metrical Point of View." MLN 7(1892), 193-213. Morley, Henry. English Writers. Vol. II. London: Cassel and Co., 1888. Nuck, R. "Zu Trautmann's Deutung des ersten und neunundachtzigsten Ratsels." Anglia 10(1888), 391-391*. Patzig, H. "Zum ersten Ratsel des Exeterbuches." Archiv 11*5(1923), 201*-207. Quirk, Randolph. "Poetic Language and Old English Metre." Early English and Norse Studies Presented to Hugh Smith, ed. Arthur Brown and Peter Foote. London: Methuen and Co., 1963, 150-171. Raffel, Burton, trans. 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"Sketch of the History of Anglo-Saxon Poetry." in Thomas Warton's History of English Poetry, ed. W. Carew Hazlitt. London: Reeves and Turney, 1871, vol. 2, 16-18. Taylor, Archer. "The Varieties of Riddles.Philologica: The Mal one Anniversary Studies, ed. T.A. Kirby and H.B. Woolf. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 19U9, 1-8. Ten Brink, Bernhard. The History of English Literature, trans. Horace M. Kennedy. London: Bell and Sons, 19LU, vol. I. - 75 - Thomas, P.G. English Literatue Before Chaucer. London: Edward Arnold and Co., 192IH Thorpe, Benjamin, ed. Codex Exoniensis: A Collection of Anglo-Saxon Poetry. London: William Pickering, 181*2. Trautmann, Moritz. "Cynewulf und die Ratsel." Anglia 6(1883), anzeiger 158-169. . "Das Sogenannte Erste Ratsel." Anglia 36(1912), 133-138. . "Quellen der Altenglischen Ratsel." Anglia 38(1911*), 31*9-351*. . "Sprache und Versbau der Altenglischen Ratsel." Anglia 38(1911*), "155-36U. . "Zeit, Heimat und Verfasser der Altenglischen Ratsel." Anglia ~3BTl911t), 365-373. . Die Altenglischen Ratsel. New York: GtE'., Stechert, 1915. Tupper, Frederick, Jr. "Originals and Analogues of the Exeter Book . Riddles." MLN 18(1903), 97-106. . "Solutions of the Exeter Book Riddles." MLN 21(1906), 97-105. . "The Cynewulfian Runes of the First Riddle." MLN 25(1910), ~23T-2l*l. , ed. The Riddles of the Exeter Book. Boston: Ginn and Co., 1910. Von Erhardt-Siebold, Erika. "The Old English Loom Riddles." Philologica: The Malone Anniversary Studies, ed. T.A. Kirby and H.B. Woolf. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 191*9, 9-17. . "The Old English Storm Riddles." PMLA 61*(19l*9), 881*-888. Whitman, F.H. "Medieval Riddling: Factors Underlying its Development." Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 71(1970), 177-185. Williams, Blanche C. Gnomic Poetry in Anglo-Saxon. New York: Columbia University Press, 1911*. Wilson, R.M. The Lost Literature of Medieval England. London: Methuen and Co., revised ed., 1970. Wrenn, C.L. A Study of Old English Literature. New York: W.W. Norton, 1967. - 76 - Wulker, Richard. Grundriss zur Geschichte der Angelsachsischen Literatur. Leipzig: Veit, ItibS. Wyatt, A.J., ed. Old English Riddles. Boston: DvC. Heath, 1912. - 77 - APPENDIX A (1) My limbs are related, as one gives them meaning They will disclose it, when the meanings join the throng [i.e., come togetherJ. (2) It is unlike with us. A wolf is on one island, I on the other. The island is wholly surrounded by fen; Fierce men ,[that is CeneJ are here on this island, They will make it £the sense of the riddle] clear when the meanings join in one. (3). It is unlike with us. I give myself far-wandering longings toward my Wolf. When it was wet weather and I sat weeping, Then the brisk warrior embraced me with his arms; That was bliss to me, but also it was pain. Wolf, my Wolf, my longings toward thee Have brought me sickness, thy seldom coming The mourning mood, not want of meat. Hearest thou? Eadwaccer, the whelp of us both, Carries a wolf to the wood. (li) It is easy to separate what never was joined, Our song together.1 1 Morley, p. 218-219. - 78 - APPENDIX B Tupper divides the riddles showing borrowings from Latin originals into three groups.1 The six riddles of the first group show strong debt to the Latin, he says. Of these, four—K-D 1*7, 60, 85 and 86— show close use of Symphosius (though 85 and 86 employ only one line of Symphosius's three), and two—35 and 1*0—are virtually line-by-line translations of Aldhelm (two lines of Old English for one of Latin). The eleven riddles of Tupper*s second group "employ motives of Symphosius and Aldhelm in such fashion as to suggest direct borrowing from the Latin enigmas." These are K-D 9, 16, 37 and 65, which show some debt to Symphosius, and 12, 26, 38, 1*9, 51, 63 arid 81*(?) , which bear some 3 resemblance to Aldhelm. The final group comprises riddles which demonstrate slight links with the Latin, "so slight indeed that the likeness may often be accidental, or else produced by identity of topic." These are K-D 1-3, 5, 8, 10, 11, 20, 27, 28, 3l*, 1*8, 53, 56, 57, 59, 71, 73, 83, 91. Wyatt^, agrees, but for a few riddles, with Tupper's study of debt to Latin sources, but lists a further four, K-D 30, 58, 66 and 87, which he says contain "clear borro*ri.ng" from the Latin, and he sees more "clear borrowing" in 1*8, which Tupper had seen as only doubtfully 1 REB, pp. xl-xliv. 2 "But that long poem during its longer part declares its independence of Latin sources," REB, p. xlii. 3 1*9 shows debt only if it is solved as 'bookcase.' 1* pp. xxxx-xxx. -79 - connected. Trautmann, in his study of the sources in 191U , saw definite use of Latin originals in 18 of the riddles (8, 12, 13, Hi, 16, 26, 35, 37, 38, UO, U7, 55, 60, 65, 83, 85, 86, 93)6, and traces of the Latin \ detectable in five more (5, 31, Ul, U9, 50). Unlike Tupper and Wyatt, however, Trautmann did feel Eusebius, and to a lesser extent Tatwine, to have had some influence on the Exeter riddles. Thus LU and 93 of his first list (both influenced by Eusebius 30) do not appear in either Tupper's or Wyatt's lists. Riddle 13, in which Trautmann finds the influence of Eusebius 38, Tupper lists with the riddles from the popular tradition. Three of Trautmann's second list differ from Tupper's and Wyatt*s classifications. In two of these, 31 and Ul, Trautmann follows Dietrich in noting a parallel to Aldhelm. 12. Two things are certain, Trautmann concludes: "1, for the majority of the Exeter riddles Latin models can not be proven, and 2, even where the Anglo-Saxon poet borrows, he does it, except in the cases of 33 [K-D 35] Mailcoat and 38 [K-D U0] Creation, with the greatest individuality: he paints over, reconstructs, reasons differently and 7 wins from the objects new significance." * "Quellen der Altenglischen Ratsel," Anglia 38(19lU), 3U9-35U. 6 86 "if it really means one-eyed garlic seller." ^ loc. cit., p. 352. - 80 - APPENDIX C OPENING AND CLOSING FORMULAS Opening Formulas (see Table II) D. ic seah: 13 19 31 ...ic seah sellic ping 32 ...sipum sellic ic seah U2 51 52 53 55 59 6h 87 E. ic wiht geseah: 29 (and variants) 3k 36 37 Ic pa wihte geseah 38 Ic pa wiht geseah 56 Ic waes baer inne baer ic ane geseah winnende wiht 68 Ic pa wiht geseah 75 Ic swiftne geseah 76 Ic ane geseah F. ic eom wunderlicu wiht: 18 ~ 20 23 Ic eom wraetlic wiht 2k 25 G. icwat: k3 U9 58 H. ic gefraegn: U5 Ic on wincle gefraegn U8 67 Ic on binge gefraegn (damaged, but Wyatt, Tupper, Mackie and Krapp and Dobbie all agree on the restoration) - 81 - I. wiga is on eorban wundrum acenned: 5o 8U An wiht is on eorban wundrum acenned J. wiht is wraetlic: 70 . 82 wiht is [...] (frag.) K. Is bes middangeard missenlicum wisum gewlitegad wraettum gefraetwad: 31 32 This formula is prefixed only to these riddles, which both also contain another opening formula of the ic seah variety. The repetition in these consecutive riddles may be only the result of a mistake. Closing Formulas li. saga hwaet ic hatte (and variants): 1 saga hwa mec pecce oppe hu ic hatte 3 8 10 12 19 23 36 saga hwaet hio waere 39 gif bu maege reselan recene gesecgan sobum wordum saga hwaet hio hatte 62 66 73 80 83 86 M. hwaet seo wiht sy: 28" " micel is to hycganne wisfaestum menn hwaet seo wiht sy 31 micel is to hycgenne wisum woSboran hwaet sio wiht sie 32 rece gif bu cunne wis worda gleaw hwaet sio wiht sie 35 saga so&cwidum searoboncum gleaw wordum wisfaest hwaet bis gewaede sy - 82 - 36 bu wast gif bu const to gesecganne baet we so6 witan hu baere wihte wise gonge 1*1 baet is to gebencanne beode gehwylcum wisfaestum werura hwaet seo wiht sy 67 secge se be cunne wisfaestra hwylc hwaet seo wiht sy N. frige hwaet ic hatte: Ik 16 26 27 0. raed hwaet ic maene: 61 (This may be a variant of L or N, but more likely it is a single example here of a further type. cf. "Solomon and Saturn," 237, saga hwaet ic maene. DIFFERENCES BETWEEN TUPPER*S LISTS (REB, p. lxv) AND THE PRESENT STUDY Opening Formulas 3 13 I think Ic seah in this riddle is an opening formula (cf. 31 , 323). 33 Wiht cwom aefter wege wraetlicu lipan: Though this has something in common with the wiht is wraetlic openings, the theme of the riddle is worked in, so I feel it should not be called properly formulaic. U7 me paet puhte: By the economy of words this may be formulaic, but it appears nowhere else in the riddles as an opening device. Compare, however, 873 micel me puhte, where it is simply part of the text. 82 Though fragmentary, this was probably of the wiht is wraetlic type. 89 Tupper lists this riddle as having no opening formula, but the test is not applicable, as little remains of the opening. Closing Formulas 20, UO Tupper mistakenly lists these in his 'no closing' list. - 83 - is obviously incomplete, and he elsewhere (REB, pp. xcvi, 16) feels 20 is also incomplete. U3, 55, 59 Though many of the traditional terms are used, the handling of these closings is far too skillful for them to be properly called formulaic. Note the common use in i;2, 55 of Nu to lead into the closing, and that a reference back to the subject of the riddle is worked in in all four cases. nemnaS hy sylfe: Though it certainly has a formula-like economy of expression, this ending, if it is translated 'They name themselves' (Baum, p. 21), could not have been a very portable traditional phrase.