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Craig Williamson, ed.,The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book (Chapel Hill: Univ. of N. C. Press, 1977), p. 399. notes that Old English riddles do not normally have persons or professions as subjects. F. Dietrich presents his solution in “Die Räthsel des Exeterbuchs: Würdigung, Lö sung und Herstellung,”ZfdA, 11 (1859), 487 ff.; K. S. Kiernan his in “Cwene: the Old Profession of Exeter Book Riddle 95,”MP, 72 (197 ), 384–89.
Frederick J. Tupper,The Riddles of the Exeter Book (Boston: Ginn and Co. 1910), pp. lxxix-xc, and Williamson, p. 25.
Williamson provides sources for all the solutions, including Kay's “phallus.” Donald Kay, “Riddle 20: A Revaluation,”TSL, 13 (1968), 133–39, does not refer to Laurence K. Shook's “Old English Riddle No. 20:Heoruswealwe,” Franciplegius (N.Y.: N.Y. Univ. Press, 1965). 194–204, and thus finds Moritz Trautmann the only scholar who does not accept “sword” as the primary solution.
Paull F. Baum, tr.,Anglo-Saxon Riddles of the Exeter Book (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1963). Gregory Jember includes Riddles 4, 11, 17, 18, 20, 21, 23, 25, 30, 37, 42, 44, 45, 54, 61, 62, 65, 80, 87 and 91 (Krapp-Dobbie numbering) in the sexual group of his 1975 University of Denver dissertation, “An Interpretative Translation of the Exeter Book Riddles.”
A. E. H. Swaen, “Het 18e Oudengelsche Raadsel,”Neophilologus, 4 (1919), 258–62.
Sigmund Freud,The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1965), n. 622.
Birds with Human Souls: A Guide to Bird Symbolism (Knoxville: Univ. of Tenn. Press. 1978), pp. 59–60.
Frederick Bracher, “Understatement in Old English Poetry,”PMLA, 52 (1947), 915–34, discusses the “use of a weaker word than the context calls for” and the “denial of the opposite.” I will be discussing the function of the second kind oflitotes. Stanley B. Greenfield defines variation inA Critical History of Old English Literature (N.Y.: N.Y. Univ. Press, 1968), p. 77. as “a double or multiple statement of the same idea, each restatement suggesting through its choice of words either a general or more specific quality, or a different attribute of that concept;” and inThe Interpretation of Old English Poems (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), pp. 71–72, he discusses the way that variation develops different evaluative perspectives in “Judith.”
Williamson, pp. 78–80.
Shook translateswaldend in 1.4b as “falconer,” while I use the more general “lord.” He translateswisað as “trains,” suggesting continous action, while I have “ directs.”
I replace the full stop of the period with a comma, then translate the followingþonne as “ when.” The basic sentence then becomes “My byrnie and the wire around my death-bringing gem shine bright when I carry treasure over the dwellings.” The embedded sentences are: “My lord gave me the wire. “ My lord directs me to conflict on my own,” and also, if one takes the modifierwidgalum as representative of an underlying sentence, “I wander.”
Here I prefer a less specific denotation than Shook's “weary of riding [his fist]” forradwerigne.
Shook has called lines 15b-16a a “teasing passage,” and if he means “troublesome” I certainly agree. I translate “Often I, daring . . .” to makefreene, an adjective, modifyic. Three adjectives modify the subject at the beginning of three successive a-lines.Radwerigne andorlegfromne are also separated from the pronoun they modify. I takeœt his freonde to be an adverbial of place, telling where it is that the hawk causes trouble, but the phrase remains very ambiguous. “Near his friend” does not tellwhose friend or if the friend is male or female. Shook's paraphrase is “Oft I have injured other beings, as I said above [11.8b-9a], but I have even injured a friend of my king's.” I construe the passage to mean that the hawk does not have trouble outside the hall, where there is plenty of room to move about: but within the hall, near the “friend,” he causes considerable trouble and is even “shooed away” (if “ outlawed” can be taken so lightly) with “weapons.”
Shook translateshœleþa gestreona as “[my] power to beget heroes.” I translate it just as “treasures of men,” but I think Shook's interpretation of meaning is valid, at least as an underlying, antithetical meaning.
My translation ofwirum dol contrasts quite directly with Shook's “proud of ornaments.”
I takewif to mean “woman” rather than “formel.” Tupper,Riddles, p. 133, interprets 11.33 ff. as “the only picture of the shrew or scold in Old English poetry.” I think it is possible to take the passage as an expression of a woman's anger without accepting Tupper's argument that it is the conventional woman's anger at an implement of war. A woman could be angry at an unruly bird.
I take floceðhyre folmum as “claps with her hands” rather than “beats with her wings.”
R. F. Leslie, in “Analysis of Stylistic Devices and Effects in Anglo-Saxon Literature,”Essential Articles for the Study of Old English Poetry, Jess B. Bessinger and Stanley J. Kahrl, eds. (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1968), pp. 257–58, discusses “conceptual variation,” in which something can he added to the sense. In the first variation here, “honors me” is the basic idea. “Adorns with gold and silver” is a more particular way of saving “honors,” and “in the hall” adds the idea of place.
Freud, p. 353, notes that ancient languages parallel dreams in their use of single words to refer to extreme opposites.
Freud's correspondences are as applicable to riddle interpretation as to that of dreams. Norman Holland has pointed out inThe Dynamics of Literary Response (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968), p. 32, that “Literature . . . transforms primitive, childish fantasies into adult, civilized meanings.” Freud's own account of one of his childish fantasies, a dream about sparrow-hawks (Interpretation, pp. 622–23), has an interesting relationship to the riddle under consideration here.
D. W. Robertson, Jr., “Historical Criticism,”English Institute Essays (N.Y.: Colombia Univ. Press, 1950), 3–31, states this position most positively, but Professor Robertson, at the conclusion of a seminar on Robertsonian criticism which was part of the Southeastern Medieval Association Conference in Tallahassee, Florida in March, 1975, said that any of the modern approaches, responsibly used, could have value.
Hans Hass,The Human Animal (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1970), p. 74, notes the correlation.
Dorothy Whitelock,The Audience of Beowulf (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951), p. 17.
John E. Mack,Nightmares and Human Conflict (N.Y.: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), p. 216, describes the effect of war dreams.
p. 202.
Clinton Albertson, S. J.,Anglo-Saxon Saints and Heroes (Bronx, N.Y.: Fordham Univ. Press, 1967), p. 19.
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Nelson, M. Old English Riddle 18 (20): A description of ambivalence. Neophilologus 66, 291–300 (1982). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02050619
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02050619