RIDDLES AT WORK IN THE EARLY MEDIEVAL TRADITION: WORDS, IDEAS, INTERACTIONS

Above all else, this new volume—the first edited collection dedicated to the study of early medieval English riddling—is invested in voices. Multiple perspectives are valued over definitive solutions, so that the book concludes by posing the riddle of who has the capacity—in a field long gated by learned authority, medieval and modern—to riddle out and unlock these texts. “We all can,” is the book's bracing answer, offering up as it does an eclectic and variegated “sampler of scholarly interpretations,” with essays that draw on many recent developments within an ever more open and fascinating field (pp. 289, 8).The sample appropriately includes essays focused both on Anglo-Latin enigmata and on vernacular riddling, though the weight of emphasis predictably falls on examining the famous riddles of the Exeter Book. Putting Latin learning into conversation with Old English riddling is not in itself out of the ordinary, and even some of the most resonant intertexts explored here are not altogether unfamiliar, though many are explored with great devotion to detail (for example, Neville Mogford's work on computus yields extraordinary insight into underlying paradoxes of theory and perception enriching celestial enigmata). Several other essays make sound contributions that are perhaps most notable for fleshing out and illustrating features of perennial interest in the field; essays on wonder, craft, and metaphor, for example, lay out elemental aspects of the genre with grace and clarity and may serve as useful invitations for new readers to join the game. Jonathan Wilcox's essay—on the interplay of paradox, obfuscation, and humor in riddling—is another exemplary instance, for incongruity is indeed a fundamental pleasure of these texts. Nor does the volume abandon altogether the venerable scholarly game of guessing at novel answers or refrain from engaging in the arguably more challenging, if also well-established, project of attempting to discern the patterns of play and conventions of obfuscation underlying the genre's poetics. Such questions remain key.And yet the collection as a whole also reflects a productive trend in the field to open up these texts to other theoretical perspectives and possibilities for interpretation. The nonhuman voice of the riddle creature speaks readily to a range of decentering critical trends—posthuman, ecofeminist, new materialist, to name just a few—and a full spread of such approaches is presented for the reader to sample, including (to mention an exemplary instance) Peter Buchanan's corporally disorienting reading of Aldhelm's leech. The most insightful of these offerings, though, do not simply apply such theories parasitically, but work to unsettle our understanding of the genre and its larger place within early medieval literary culture. In so doing, they ask us to reconsider the nature of the challenge. For example, in one of the book's most compelling contributions, “Enigmatic Knowing and the Vercelli Book,” Britt Mize suggests that the medievalist quest for definitively accepted riddle solutions may have more in common with a modern culture of academic territoriality than with an early medieval tradition of wisdom poetry that valued contemplative cooperation among a community of askers and answerers. By deemphasizing the potential finality of solving, we may begin to see more clearly how these riddles fit into a larger literary culture, one that has often been generally characterized as “enigmatic”—in senses both broad and narrow.It is nevertheless not necessary to ignore the generic specificity of medieval literary riddling to embrace the value of these nontraditional approaches. Mize's arguments pair quite well with another standout contribution in the collection, “Mind, Mood, and Meteorology in Þrymful Þeow (R.1–3)” by James Paz, which engages in its own way with many longstanding preoccupations of Exeter Riddle scholarship, including the relation of riddle to solution and the larger structure of the collection. Paz's approach borrows from new materialist perspectives, as well as from recent work on early medieval concepts of the self, to reevaluate a foundational puzzle of the Exeter collection: how to understand the stormy sequence (Riddles 1–3, in the traditional numbering, though see below) that leads off the first stint of riddling in the manuscript. The wild tempest of this riddle, Paz argues, is animated by a medieval conception of the mind, which both metaphorically shapes and disguises its stormy subject. This insight, in turn, offers an elegant and persuasive way to understand this text's placement within the collection: as serving a meta-enigmatic function perfectly appropriate to the opening of a riddle sequence: “Just as we try to articulate a solution and close the game down, the riddle carries on, swept along by the storm” (p. 205). In foregrounding the image of the solver's tempestuous process, the Exeter Riddles reveal their interest in both the mechanics of the game as well as the larger riddle of enigmatic knowing. For related reasons, it seems to me the editors make a wise choice in leaving the (nearly) last word to Miller Wolf Oberman, whose essay on translating riddle fragments is a moving meditation on the links between riddling and less literal enigmas of poetry, language, and the inestimable challenge of reading a fragmentary past: “they meet at the damage, where words turn to burns” (p. 279).Much of the best of this volume, then, expands our understanding of medieval enigmatic poetry, considering these texts not only as puzzles to solve but as poems to encounter and re-encounter in the ongoing work of knowing and unknowing. One striking choice that the editors of this volume have made is in keeping with that spirit. As is well known, the textual boundaries of what we call the Exeter Book Riddles are difficult to pin down with confidence. The Storm Riddle(s) discussed above is a representative example, in that editors have chosen to read the text(s) variously as three separate riddles (Riddle 1, Riddle 2, and Riddle 3 in the ASPR edition of Krapp and Dobbie) or as one continuous text (All as Riddle 1, in the numbering system adopted in Craig Williamson's influential 1977 edition). That editorial choice—along with others—has ripple effects in the numbering of the rest of the riddles, leading to inconsistency and the potential for confusion. The solution to this problem adopted in Riddles at Work (first proposed by Jennifer Neville in a 2019 article in Medium Ævum) is to discard the “riddle” nomenclature altogether and to assign each text its own title, derived from language found describing the riddle-subject itself in the body of the poem. Thus, Riddle(s) 1–3 is referred to as Þrymful Þeow (“Glorious Servant”).There are drawbacks as well as advantages to this particular proposal. One advantage, cited in the editorial introduction, is to remove the impression of “a homogeneity that we do not believe the Exeter Book riddles possess” and to afford them attention “as individual poems in their own right” (p. 5). The difficulty of recalling riddle numbers (coupled with the complexity of competing systems) is also cited as a reason to make a change, but the possibility of instead using riddle solutions (as in “The Bagpipes Riddle”) is rejected for good reason: “many of these riddles defy scholarly consensus” (p. 5). This objection, however, unfortunately also holds for the approach taken here: consensus of what amounts to a “highly appropriate,” memorably identifiable, and representative detail from each text will be difficult to achieve. For example, Riddle 26 (the one describing a manuscript manufactured from a sheepskin) is given the title Nama Min is Mære (“My Name is Famous”), but the creature of Riddle 26’s real claim to fame is not its name, but the excruciatingly detailed self-portrait it paints of a sheep slaughtered, skinned, soaked, scraped, inked, and otherwise shaped into the form of a book. Asking scholars to replace the memory of this vivid image will be a tough sell, and employing Old English phrases for each title creates its own barriers, quite apart from the obvious difficulty they would pose for “those uninitiated into the study of this collection” (whom this new system purports to aid) (p. 5). For Riddle(s) 1–3, for example, this proposal requires fully five different titles to describe various configurations (Riddle 1 = Þrymful Þunie; Riddle 2 = Under Yþa Geþræc; Riddle 3 = Min Frea Fæste Genearwað; Riddle 2–3 as one riddle = Garsecges Grund; Riddle(s) 1–3 as one riddle = Þrymful Þeow). Even if one were to consider each of these titles highly appropriate, this is quite a hurly-burly of verbiage to bear in mind. More than one Þrymful feels like a mouthful. And for all that trouble, this scheme would be less transparent in regard to potential textual relationships: when we read “Riddle(s) 1–3,” we are silently told something about the debatable unity or separability of these texts. And there are other advantages of the status quo. Riddle 44 of course follows Riddle 43 in the manuscript: this is good to keep in mind, but will the user of this new system easily remember where Wrætlic Hongað stands in relation to Giest in Geardum? And, while Ligbysig is a vivid descriptor, the old mundane title of Riddle 30b silently implies the existence of Riddle 30a. As these texts are fond of reminding us, the old ordinary ways often conceal hidden wisdom.Still, it is far easier to knock another's proposal than to offer up one of one's own. I acknowledge that this volume's approach to retitling the Exeter Riddles, if not entirely satisfying, may inch us closer to a future alternative solution. It certainly moves the conversation forward, as do the best essays crafted with care for this valuable volume. The unnumbering of the Exeter Riddles holds genuine advantages, not least of which is the invitation to appreciate the individual qualities of each poem. Yet these texts also remain undeniably riddles, and it seems to me that the work ahead will involve the challenge of at once attending to the specific genre(s) of these poems, while also continuing to open them up to such admirable richness of approach and range of scholarly voice.