The Dark Glass

In Reading Old English Riddles: The Dark Glass, Robert DiNapoli translates and discusses nearly all the Old English riddles preserved in the Exeter Book, an eleventh-century poetry anthology. Most are powerful poems as well as engaging riddles, by turns playful, insightful and profound. Their solutions range from common domestic articles such as ‘key’ or ‘jug’ to wild and domestic animals; elemental agencies such as ‘fire’, ‘wind’ and ‘water’; and large or abstract quarry such as ‘the spoken word’ and ‘creation’. Their anonymous authors revel in the world’s play of appearances, which dance through these texts in uncanny revelations that explore the complex relationship between such phenomena and the mind’s capacity to distinguish and identify them.

from the introduction:

Most human cultures employ riddles as ways to engage the world for least some sense of its meaning. Reality questions human consciousness, which responds with questions of its own. Such question-and-answer exchanges can be deadly serious, like the Sphinx’s murderous ‘Sorry, you lose’ response to failed attempts at solving her riddle and her suicidal rage that follows its solution by Oedipus. Or they can offer light entertainment: What’s brown and sticky? A stick. Riddles play: clowning jesters one moment, deep wells of reflection the next. The Shakespearean fool traffics in obscure nonsense that, once resolved, speaks to the heart of the drama he skirts past with deceptively careless ease.

The eleventh-century codex known as the Exeter Book contains every kind of poetry composed in Anglo-Saxon England. Almost a quarter of its pages are filled with nearly a hundred riddles, the shortest a bare two lines long, the longest, one hundred and eight. Their solutions range from ‘Piss’ to ‘Iceberg’ to ‘Bookworm’ to ‘Creation’, not to mention the odd curiosity such as ‘A One-Eyed Seller of Garlic’, and all points in between. Crude sexual humour might disguise a meditation on how soul quickens body, while riddles to do with books and writing slyly question the textual foundations of medieval culture and ecclesiastical authority. Taken as a whole, the Exeter Book riddles offer remarkable insights into the mind of the early Middle Ages.