In this book, Jennifer Neville asks the reader to consider what lies beneath the surface of the many Exeter Book riddles. Rather than focusing on sources or single solutions, Neville’s volume proposes new and innovative ways of approaching the Exeter Book riddles through a focus on the multiplicity of answers and the ambiguous nature of these solutions. Neville embraces the fact that the manuscript itself provides no solutions to these puzzling texts, arguing instead that “we should explore and embrace the range of solutions that a medieval audience might have proposed, which may include far-fetched answers, too” (17). The title of the book alone, Truth is Trickiest,a statement drawn from Maxims II, sets the reader up for the complex nature of the discussion that will follow. The volume provides a refreshing view of the Exeter Book riddles and their function as puzzles to be thought over, reconsidered, and continually re-examined.
After an insightful introduction that sets up the idea of multiplicity in the possible answers to the Exeter Book riddles, Neville introduces the heroic idiom as a framework for understanding several riddles in the second to fourth chapters. Chapter 2, “The Joy of Limits: The Heroic Idiom as ‘Code’” engages with this heroic idiom, evoking images of the heroes, courage, and weapons found in poems such as The Battle of Maldon and Beowulf, ideas wholly familiar to readers of Old English poetry. Neville argues convincingly that, through this idiom, we find a boundary, or limits within which we can imagine the solution to a specific riddle. The idiom, according to Neville, serves “not only for behaviour but for content” (18). It is also this idiom and its related imagery that allows us to fill in gaps in now-damaged riddles, such as Clothed in Red (R.71), and to imagine the way in which the riddle originally unfolded within the carefully delineated boundaries of heroic expectations in poetry. Yet Neville also makes clear that, while a riddle may be readable in this context, it is not the only option, as is the case with Towering Tree (R.53) which she also addresses in Chapter 3.
Chapters 3 and 4 engage with the heroic idiom, but from an entirely different perspective than Chapter 2. Chapter 3 argues that, rather than offering limits to a reader’s expectations of a solution, the heroic idiom can serve as a disguise or misdirection. A second reading of Towering Tree (R.53) offers a clear contrast between the limits discussed in Chapter 2 and the camouflage that makes up Chapter 3. At the same time, Neville also offers moments of comparison with non-riddle texts such as Andreas, which deploys the same kind of heroic language as a stand-in for spiritual activity (76-77). The careful attention to this poem’s opening and the possibility of how it could be reframed as a riddle is both illuminating and intriguing. Just as readers are beginning to feel that they are on solid ground in identifying moments in which the heroic idiom is deployed as both an identifier and a disguise, Neville challenges them further in Chapter 4—what if the heroic idiom introduces irony or paradox? What if a riddle about a scribe is really a commentary on that scribe’s self-importance? What do these riddles provide in terms of a commentary or critique of early medieval English culture? Several readings deepen our understanding of Neville’s key argument in the book—it is not the one solution that matters; rather, it is the various ways of rereading and reconsidering the riddles that offer layers of contrast and complexity to them.
Chapters 5 and 6 move away from the heroic idiom into considerations of domestic objects as solutions (Chapter 5) and the sexual riddles (Chapter 6). Chapter 5, “Domestic Practices: Manufacturing and Implements,” approaches the questions of violence and social hierarchy within riddles that otherwise are seen as describing everyday items: for example, a churn (R.54), an onion (R.25) or a key (R.44). The way the reader has been asked to consider how a single trope, the heroic, serves multiple functions in previous chapters, sets the reader up for the discussions of violence which follow. Several riddles engage with the manufacture of domestic objects but include violence in the description of this process. Why? Is this violence construction or destructive? At the same time, there is the trope of the domestic object—the implement trope—that offers a space of commentary and, possibly, critique on early medieval society. In this, the mundane of the domestic stands in for something else. Neville’s solution of “hive and bee” for Earth-fast (R.49), most frequently solved as “bookcase” or “baking oven,” elegantly illustrates the benefit of considering how these tropes can function, create limits, and serve as diversions in the riddles.
The final chapter turns to questions of reproduction and sex in the Exeter Book riddles, a topic that naturally brings to light those riddles often deemed to have obscene answers, or a clear double entendre. Neville’s focus on the use of tropes and idioms in the earlier chapter is extended into this as she questions how the trope of reproduction appears. Furthermore, she carefully digs beyond the surface in riddles that portray it, asking how and when sexuality, pleasure, and reproduction actually appear in these riddles. Neville provides many thoughtful and insightful solutions to the sexual riddles and carefully sums up her diligent study by pointing to the implicit shame that many of these sexual riddles bring to light when one tries to provide a solution. Yet this shame has a purpose in Neville’s study for, as she states, it drives us to labour for another solution and in doing so “to read more carefully, to excavate the imagery, to be suspicious of assumptions, to revisit familiar tropes, to go back and start again (and again and again)” (241).
An invaluable addition to the book is found in the appendix which provides a table of solutions to each riddle. Carefully arranged with citations for each proposed solution, the variation in possible answers is immediately made clear and available. Within this is the title of each riddle as assigned by Neville in the beginning of the book (xiii-xv). While previous scholarship has tended to identify the riddle by number and solution, Neville consciously adopts a different system. Instead, the riddles are identified by a title drawn from a quotation found in the text itself. The lack of “solutions” as titles and the way that this approach leaves the reader in the dark about any anticipated reading draws the reader into the intellectual space in which Neville proposes we read the riddles—the riddles themselves lack solutions in the manuscript, so we too should read them without a clear solution at the forefront. This ambiguity exercises the imagination and forces us to read and reread the same text multiple times, from multiple perspectives. Such an approach to the titles serves as a constant reminder of possibility as one reads each chapter and explores the variety of riddles with which Neville engages.
The conclusion offers the apt title of “Not Concluding but Continuing.” In revisiting Lone Dweller (R.5), Neville demonstrates the variety of solutions proposed in the book (seven, in addition to the traditional “shield” solution) and continues, in the spirit of rereading and inquiry, to continue offering further solutions influenced by our understanding of the sexual riddles in Chapter 5. In this, Neville demonstrates that the process of thinking and pondering these solutions is never really over. As we continue to read, other riddles and literary texts influence the way we think about a riddle we thought we had solved. There is always space for new ideas, new approaches, and ambiguity that causes us to question if we’ve found the solution. After all, as Neville emphasizes throughout the book, without an authoritative solution in the manuscript itself, can we ever really be certain of a solution? Perhaps then the point is to go back, to read again, and to ponder anew, an idea that Neville so aptly sums up in the final words “Please linger. And go on, have another go” (251).