Aldhelm, the abbot of Malmesbury (b. 635-645, d. 709-710), is having a moment. In 2015, A. M. Juster published a lively, modern English verse translation of his Aenigmata, complete with learned commentary. The volume of essays under review here, Riddles at Work, edited by Cavell and Neville, also puts Aldhelm up front. I do not only mean his frequent mention in the General Introduction, where a discussion of his “prefatory poem” (3) is juxtaposed to a startingly different Exeter Riddle 42, which makes a metapoetic statement with a pair of copulating chickens (2-4). [1] The first page of Aldhelm’s preface, his “mission statement” (1), with his name spelled out in a double acrostic, appears on the cover of the book. Two chapters analyze individual enigmata of his, and many others consider his work intermittently, alongside Old English or other medieval Latin texts. It is not hard to understand the renewed excitement for Aldhelm. His riddles are intricate and thought-provoking, and add up to a nice, round hundred. We have his name and much other background; the solutions for the enigmas in the titles; and even some commentary on word usage in the form of the glosses. The riddle-masters of the Exeter Book are anonymous and have usually not provided solutions. The reasoning behind the order and presentation of their poems in the manuscript is up for debate; occasionally, we cannot even tell when one riddle ends and another begins. Despite the best efforts of scholars like Mercedes Salvador-Bello, we cannot consistently appeal to the Isidorian encyclopedic vision to help us sort out the structuring of the enigmas in the Exeter Book. [2]

The constant Aldhelmian presence in Riddles at Work comes as a part of putting the Old English enigmas alongside their Anglo-Latin counterpart. As the editors recognize, we are witnessing “a scholarly trend away from an emphasis on the uniqueness of Old English poetry and toward an appreciation of the multilingual nature of early medieval English literary culture” (6). My concern would be if we--rightfully suspicious of the Romanticist nationalist notions of the Genius of the People, and even more terrifyingly, the supposed Germanic essence of the early English--went to the other extreme, and always imposed the Latin models on the vernacular verse. Roberta Frank, in her recent essay “Reading Beowulf with Isidore’s Etymologies,” spent most of the time finding the echoes between the two authors and works, and yet she concluded: “Isidore’s Etymologies, like ill-fitting reading glasses, only sometimes allows the world of Beowulf to come into sharper focus.” [3] I would say that the same is true with Aldhelm or any other Latin enigmatist and the Old English riddles. We have to use all the ocular devices at our disposal, but we should still approach the texts one at a time, on their own terms.

This is a tight-rope walk, between wider intellectual, Latin contexts and singular vernacular artifacts, that the contributors of Riddles at Work manage rather well. Robert Stanton in “Sound, Voice, and Articulation in the Exeter Book Riddles” surveys the learned textual tradition in Greek and Latin, from Aristotle through Isidore to Aldhelm, to tease out the ideas of sound and meaning among human and non-human animals. He takes Aldhelm’s oeuvre, enigmata included, “as a vital bridge between classical language theory and the Old English poetic tradition” (92). At the same time, Stanton never loses sight of what makes the vernacular verse, and specific instantiations of it such as Riddle 60 (“Reed”), distinct. He writes, “The riddler [in Riddle 60] goes well beyond Aldhelm in insisting not only on the highly physical nature of articulation (the writing joint), but on the necessity of compatible component parts [hands and knives] joined by a technological process [cutting a pen or an instrument], thereby merging the principle of intelligibility with the notion of distinction and compatible parts” (101).

Another tight-rope walk occurs between older and newer ways of interpreting literature that the editors and Victoria Symons call “traditional and experimental approaches to this complex genre” in the General Introduction (8). I would agree, again, that we need all the pairs of reading-glasses to read any Old English text, from word, manuscript, and source-and-analogue studies to postcolonial, queer, disability, sound, and ecomaterialist studies. Francesca Brooks packs many lenses into her subtle masterpiece “The Crafting of Sound in the Riddles of the Exeter Book” to look “at the “acts...[of] material and linguistic crafting” which “share a significant semantic overlap and a common hoard of vocabulary” (77), using meticulous studies of Old English polysemic terms like gliwian “to play; to adorn” (83), and the findings of ecomaterialist and sound studies. Karin Olsen blends the vintage approach of diagram-rich High Structuralism with cognitive theory in “Warriors and Their Battle Gear: Conceptual Blending in Anhaga (R.5) and Wæpnum Awyrged (R.20),” but what I find more useful that the insights afforded by the specific theoretical blend is Olsen’s allowance for a variety in enigma types: “Perhaps two riddles were combined at some stage of transmission [in Riddle 20 (“Sword”)], yet even a two-in-one riddle composition is certainly conceivable...[R]iddle solving is an open-ended cognitive process that depends heavily on the reader’s or listener’s own input in terms of cultural insights, interpretive choices, and personal preferences” (124). A deep dive into medieval Latin grammar does not preclude us from engaging the twenty-first-century posthumanist thought of Mel Y. Chen or Karl Steel, as Buchanan’s “Monstrous Healing: Aldhelm’s Leech Riddle” demonstrates. The attention that Corinne Dale pays in “Freolic, sellic: An Ecofeminist Reading of Modor Monigra (R.84)” to grammatical gender of Old English words for water and the biblical commentary on the figure of Wisdom, added to her knowledge of ecofeminist theories, enables her to illuminate the dynamics of Riddle 84 (“Water”). These are all ways to undertake scholarly analysis, best when used in combination as above, intersectionally; and a number of them are represented in the volume, but not all and not all sufficiently, as acknowledged by Cavell and Neville in “Afterword” (289). No single volume, however large and variegated, can do everything.

An essay that could have benefited from some consideration of more recent theory is “Wundorand Wrætlic: The Anatomy of Wonder in the Sex Riddles” by Sharon E. Rhodes. It reveals an understanding of early-medieval sexuality that surpasses in its conservativity the writers of the penitentials by assuming references to reproductive heterosexual sex only. Readings of queerness in Old English literature are not new. Christopher Bishop and Phyllis Portnoy have identified aspects of nonnormative sexuality in the Exeter riddles. [4] In spite of these shortcomings, Rhodes’s brief discussion of Riddle 37 (“Bellows”) and comparison of nathwæt “something” to Latin res “thing” and modern English whatnot (50) inspired me to find another transhistorical point of affinity in sexual vocabulary. In Riddle 37, the speaker says of the servant manhandling the riddle creature: “he sunu wyrceð, bið him sylfa fæder” (in Rhodes’s translation, “he creates sons, he is the father of himself”). The author admits that “The gender specificity ofhe, sunu, and fæder also creates space for the argument that the riddle is referencing some masculine noun, such as brand (‘fire, flame’), which is also self-perpetuating, rather than referencing human sexual activity” (44). The expression “to create sons” invokes masturbation or, more widely, a non-procreative spilling of the seed. “He sunu wyrceð” thus seems to be an ancient analogue to the playfully obscene synecdoche in Lil Nas X’s line “[I want to] Shoot a child in your mouth while I am ridin’” (“Montero”), or, if you prefer, Junglepussy’s lyric, “I’ll swallow kids if he start eatin’ vegetables” (“Trader Joe”).

I would have liked to see more dialogue between the individual contributors, beyond the brief acknowledgment in the endnotes that someone else in the volume has also written about a particular riddle. Britt Mize in “Enigmatic Knowing and the Vercelli Book” looks outside of the Exeter Book, in the Franks Casket and various components of the Vercelli Book, for a unified vision of wisdom-seeking that the riddlic genre makes overtly noticeable. His treatment of the Franks Casket could have been improved with some consideration of the work of Catherine Karkov and Mize’s fellow contributor to Riddles at Work, James Paz. [5] The chapter also needs a reference to Irina Dumitrescu’s discussion of the enigmatic in Andreas. [6] Further, Mize expresses his understanding of “things” in Old English in this fashion: “I would like to move away from the reified riddle, riddle-as-thing, to think more inclusively about a simultaneously concealing and revealing attitude of text to world, which is also an attitude of writers to readers and an attitude of readers to texts” (254). The notion of “riddle-as-thing” would require some rethinking after consulting the rich, emerging body of scholarship on materiality by early-medievalists such as Corinne Dale, Paz, and others. Mize already displays some ideas current in this type of criticism: “at their best, they [the riddles] may point beyond themselves into half-seen systems of relation among humans, nature, and God” (255).

Going back to the “experimental” part of the editorial team’s formulation (8), I was only able to identify one experimental contribution, Miller Oberman’s resplendent “Dyre Cræft: New Translations of Exeter Riddle Fragments Modor Monigra (R.84), Se Wiht Wombe Hæfde (R.89), and Brunra Beot (R.92), Accompanied by Notes on Process.” Oberman wears his academic expertise lightly, and shows that the eye of a poet catches many things that escape scholars, as well as some things that confirm scholarly discoveries. He speaks of craft in the modern double sense of artful skill and a transportation vessel, admitting that only the first is operative in Old English (286). His poetic intuition is also historically correct. While the word play may not be “etymologically possible” (ibid.), imagining poems as ships was not impossible. Ernst Robert Curtius writes in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages that Aldhelm (there he is again!) spoke of the act of poetry-writing as sailing, with terrible verse being analogous to a “leaky boat” (“rimosa fragilis ingenii barca”). [7] Oberman’s own writing style communicates the transformative, transporting energy of the artifacts he carries across into the present-day English: “We can set them off and let them make their own way, crafts that are crafts. This may be a perfect definition for riddle poems in particular, which are always attempting two kinds of action, as they make water or keys or birds or bells, while simultaneously creating themselves as poems” (287). I only wish the editors had not placed Oberman’s contribution at the end because it appears as an afterthought when it could have been a more direct provocation, interruption, challenge in the beginning or the middle--especially if the volume had included at least one more essay of an experimental nature.

Riddles at Work can be described variously as a generous sampler, a rich buffet, a panoramic snapshot, or a sizeable cross-section of current Anglophone scholarship on early-medieval riddles originally written in both Anglo-Latin and Old English. Of course not every item can appeal to the reviewer’s palate. But like the Exeter enigmatic compilation, Riddles at Work is a product of many authors who have demonstrated their ability to delight, frustrate, amuse, baffle, excite, terrify, impress, and make the readers think and re-think, nod enthusiastically in agreement, and learn something when they have to disagree.

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Notes:

1. I am using the Krapp-Dobbie numbering. The volume suggests and uses a new system, developed by Jennifer Neville, of calling the riddles by memorable Old English phrases that come out of them (xiv-xvii). While I appreciate the sentiment behind the practice, as it avoids the confusion over different editorial numeration and withholds the solutions, I find it hard to implement: I cannot remember what phrase refers to what text and have to keep returning to the handy guide in the beginning. Along with the new system, Rafał Borysławski in his chapter provides the Krapp-Dobbie number and a likely solution, which makes his analysis easy to follow. Perhaps, for now, that is the best we can do. For those who say that giving the possible solutions constitutes a spoiler, I would like to point out that these poems are at least a millennium old.

2. Mercedes Salvador-Bello, Isidorean Perceptions of Order: The Exeter Book Riddles and Medieval Latin Enigmata (Morgantown: West Virginia Universtiy Press, 2015).

3. Roberta Frank, “Reading Beowulf with Isidore’s Etymologies” in Old English Lexicology and Lexicography: Essays in Honour of Antonette diPaolo Healey, ed. Haruko Momma et al. (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2020), 245-59, at 258.

4. Christopher Bishop, “Ambiguous Eroticism in the Exeter Book.” Journal of the Australian Early Medieval Association 2 (2006): 5-23; Phyllis Portnoy, “Laf-Craft in Five Old English Riddles (K-D 5, 20, 56, 71, 91).” Neophilologus 97 (2013): 555-78.

5. Catherine Karkov, “The Franks Casket Speaks Back: The Bones of the Past, the Becoming of England” in Postcolonising the Medieval Image, ed. Eva Frojmovic and Catherine Karkov (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 37-61; James Paz, “The Riddles of the Franks Casket: Enigmas, Agency and Assemblage” in Nonhuman Voices in Anglo-Saxon Literature and Material Culture(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 98-138.

6. Irina Dumitrescu, “Recollection: Andreas” in The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 90-128, at 123-25.

7. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), 129.