Written under the supervision of Mgr. Helena Znojemská, PhD, and submitted on 30 January 2013, this essay was part of my total coursework at the Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Charles University’s Faculty of Arts. The essay is published with the kind permission of the faculty.

Solutions to Riddle 28

Solving an Old English riddle may be – both for a person who is far from experienced in tackling the intricacies of Old English syntax and even for a scholar highly proficient therein – a daunting task. The lack of solutions in the case of the Exeter Book riddles would be but a minor obstacle were it not also for the fact that they seem to produce some effort in and of themselves  that makes it ever more difficult a task to discover the meaning that lies underneath.  They obey their own rules and never say more than what they deem is absolutely necessary. And even if they do give away some information, they usually do it so vaguely as to entrap the reader in the snares of potentialities. In other words, the Old English riddles generally offer a large number of textual, grammatical, and semantic ambiguities which make manipulations in support of each individual solution quite possible (Williamson). Such is precisely the case with Riddle 28, whose last four lines – to make the whole matter even more difficult for us – seem to have been erased and rewritten by some later hand. Over time, many a scholar has attempted to find the solution to what the author had in mind when scribbling it down onto the piece of parchment, to find the solution that would simply fit the best. Thus, we have arrived at the stage where we have a plurality of solutions to this riddle, some better and genuinely more feasible than others, but most of them at least highly intriguing. This essay is to consider all of these proposed solutions and eventually choose one which seems the most probable.

One of the most frequently cited solutions for Riddle 28 are ale or beer. Let us now take a closer look at the text of the riddle and confront it with these propositions so as to demonstrate the modus operandi in solving these Old English puzzles. In order to reach absolute clarity, I present the translation of the riddle to which I shall refer throughout this work.

Part of the ground is beautifully adorned

with the hardest and sharpest

and cruelest of human treasures.

Cut, rubbed, turned, dried,

bound, twisted, bleached, weakened,

prepared, adorned, brought from afar

to the doors of men. Joy is inside

of living creatures, it remains there, it lasts

in these creatures that lived a long while before.

It enjoys pleasure and doesn’t speak against it

and then, after death, it begins to judge,

speaks differently. Much is to think

for wise men what the creature is.

It is plain to see why such alcoholic solutions come to mind. They undeniably fit rather well into a considerable portion of the riddle.  The talk of joy inside of living creatures, of enjoying pleasure and not speaking against it, and only after some time and amount ingested – here veiled behind the word death – of beginning to take back our previous decisions, to speak differently,  all of these are generally associated with the consummation of alcoholic beverages.  Why beer or ale, then, in particular?

In the genre of Old English riddles it is a common practice to personify the inanimate solutions. In practical terms, what happens in the riddles is that „dead objects speak about their lot in terms that living people will understand“ (Niles, 52). Not only that, it is an equally common practice to conflate their original forms with the products, which they are in a way, and which are made from these original materials. For instance, if a riddle was to have the solution of a bow, it would not be surprising to have the text refer to it at least once as to a tree, from which the bow is to be made. In the case of our riddle, the original form of these two beverages would be malt. The cereal grower would, indeed, be cut when still in the field, the spikes rubbed so as to release the grains, the grains consequently turned and dried before being used in the process of making beer, and perhaps even bound and twisted so as to press as much liquid out of them afterwards. However, it is precisely here where the problem comes which eliminates one of the solutions. There is a difference between ale and beer, the first one consisting solely of water, malt, and yeast, and the latter one being prepared using the very same ingredients of water, malt, and yeast again, plus hops. The aforementioned problem is that beer, the beverage produced in this way, was not introduced into England until a few centuries after the riddle was first put down on parchment, that is in the 11^th century or even prior to that (Exeter Riddle ‚Ale‘).  As far as malt liquors go, then, beer, the solution so frequently cited, is quite impossible due to the fact that the beverage was technically unknown in the country at the time.

Additionally, there are problems with ale alone as well. For a perfect solution there are too many rather unfortunately chosen words in the text. It is questionable whether we can talk about ale as being beautifully adorned, and mentioning the word bleached in the process of making it sounds rather ominous. It may also be argued that preparing ale „needs mashing, boiling, and fermenting – none of which is mentioned in the process verbs“ („Old English Riddles“). It is true that the inclusion of these words in the riddle would make the answer too obvious, a feature which the scribes generally seem to have attempted to elude at all costs, but the observation of what is missing is nevertheless worth our notice. It is clear that while there are very good arguments behind the solution ale, it is not perfect.  Perhaps, some other solutions, proposed over time, offer a better answer, then?

A large group of scholars have argued for solutions from the category of musical instruments. To be more precise, they have suggested the following ones: harp, tortoise shell lyre, and horn of yew. One of the arguments for the introduction of the very category of musical instruments may lie in the Old English word dream in the seventh line. While it can be translated as joy, it may also be interpreted as sound, music, song, or melody (Bitterli, 186). In broad strokes, the first three lines would then describe the origins of the instruments, the following four lines their production, and the next five their use in feasting halls for the amusement of the dining crowds. Granted, all of these are imaginative ideas, and the part where the text would suggest that, when alive, the creatures are silent, and only after their death they begin to speak, does have an undeniable appeal to it; but again, these solutions do not come without problems.

First of all, as Craig Williamson points out, the tortoise shell lyre, „though a classical instrument, was neither known nor played in Anglo-Saxon England“ („Old English Riddles“). So much for that one. Secondly, he takes a closer look at the harp. Having translated the first two and a half lines as, „Part of the earth grows lovely and grim/With the hardest and fiercest of bitter-sharp treasures,“ and given that the Old English harps were made of maple, which is not the hardest or fiercest of woods, he concludes that this particular solution is not feasible either („Old English Riddles“). The translation does take some artistic license, it appears, but even if it didn’t, the process verbs would still seem rather suspicious if indeed meant to relate to the manufacture of a harp. The final proposition, horn of yew, is deemed by Williamson to be the most likely of the three. He writes on this subject:

The hard wood [of the yew tree] might be carved and shaped into a long horn in the fashion described [in the poem] and borne to the hall to produce its clarion joy. Irish horns of this sort have been discovered and the existence of a similarly made English wooden horns seems likely. („Old English Riddles“)

An additional, and a more recent solution as well, has been proposed – that of a damascened sword. According to Williamson, the initial three lines would refer to the origins of the sword, the ore from which the steel was extracted, and the following three lines would neatly fit the pattern-welding process of making the weapon; a process in which various iron rods are cut, twisted and bound together, weakened in the fires of the forge furnace, turned and hammered into shape („Old English Riddles“). The latter half of the riddle poses an obvious problem with this solution, though. Since it would be strange, even for the riddles, to think of ore or the sword as being joyful or enjoying pleasure, we may conclude that this part actually talks about the people wielding the sword, or falling under it. That, however, already feels like a stretch. Additionally, if we come back to the first three lines in our translation, what would be the hardest and sharpest and cruelest of human treasures? Surely not the pickaxe which would be used to mine the ore or the blacksmith’s hammer which would make the actual sword. Sure enough, we may understand the passage as referring, in its entirety, to the sword itself, but still, once again, there are too many unanswered questions to label this as the most fitting of solutions.

Which brings us to the most probable of them – parchment, or parchment being manufactured into a codex. While it is certainly true that the first three lines of the riddle do pose a bit of an obstacle, the Old English semantics may help us overcome this issue. The problem lies in the fact that it is difficult for us to see either the parchment or the codex or even the animal from which the parchment was made as being a part of the ground. However, if we replace the word ground with earth, the issue may clear up a little, the – in this case – animal being part of the earth just as everything else is, figuratively speaking. The beautiful adornment would then refer to the product of the animal’s sacrifice, the illuminated pages and ornamented cover of the codex.

Perhaps the most convincing piece of evidence follows immediately after these introductory lines. The verbs used in the riddle are uncannily similar to those used to describe the manufacture of parchment:

Parchment is made from the skin of an animal. First of all the parchmenter has to wash a skin in cold clear running water for a day and a night. […] As the skin begins to rot, the hair naturally falls out. […] Usually, however, the process of loosening the hair in parchment-making is artificially induced by soaking the skins in wooden or stone vats in a solution of lime and water. […] One by one, the wet slippery skins are taken out and draped hair side out over a great curved upright shield of wood. The parchment-maker scrapes away the hair with a long curved knife. […] [The second phase] centers around the drying of the skin while it is stretched on a frame. The pelt, floppy and wet from its last rinse, is suspended spread-eagled in a wooden frame. The skin is now tight and rubbery but still wet. […] Then the skin is allowed to dry on the frame and it shrinks and becomes tighter still as it does so. When it is all dry, the scraping and shaving begins again. („Materials and Techniques of Manuscript Production“)

Due to the fact that different animals produce variously-colored parchments, the darker ones could be further bleached to achieve the desired shade and tone; and since „the dry thin opaque parchment […] can be rolled up and stored“ („Materials and Techniques of Manuscript Production“), the binding then, may perhaps refer to the way in which the parchment could have been stored, transported to the market or, alternatively, to the monastery.

Filling in the gaps, the riddle precisely describes the procedure in manufacturing parchment and, eventually, a book of some sort. A very basic knowledge of the Old English literary culture will suffice in ascertaining the nature of this book. Since the production of parchment was an extremely time-consuming and costly business (while a wide variety of farm animals were used to make parchment – various species of sheep, cows, and goats – the most precious parchment was made of lambs and as such was especially expensive), and since the vast majority of the population at the time who could write and read were to be found in monastic scriptoria, it is most probable that the resulting book is a religious codex or a gospel-book, perhaps, as these were one of the most frequently produced pieces of writing in that period (Williams).

As for the latter half of the riddle, it is understandable that joy would be found inside of these living creatures as the book would be full of words and joyful stories to be delivered to an audience. Dieter Bitterli illustrates this point with respect to the semantics of the word dream, in our text translated as joy:

The Old English term dream can mean anything from joy, bliss, or jubilation, to noise, sound, music, song, or melody, including the jubilant singing of heavenly choirs and the singing of psalms. Here, the latter may well be implied, since what emerges as the sound of living beings from within the codex is nothing but the words of a (perhaps biblical or liturgical) text, written onto the pages of the book. (Bitterli, 186)

The joy is described as remaining and lasting there in these creatures, in these books, and there is one very practical reason for that. Parchment is known for its extraordinary durability, which greatly surpasses that of leather, papyrus or other medias known at the time. In perfect conditions, „it can last for a thousand years of more“ („Materials and Techniques of Manuscript Production“).

To move onward in the riddle, the phrase these creatures that lived a long while before on the following line may then refer back to the animal from which the hide was used to make the parchment. Finally, in this line of argumentation, it would be the animal that would enjoy pleasure and not speak against it, whereas, after its death, it would be the parchment or the book that would begin to judge and speak differently. There are two ways of interpreting this judgment. Firstly, riddles often stress in this way „the innocent and peaceable origins“ (Irving, Jr., 5) of the objects and „speak about their lot“ (Niles, 2). In this line of thought, the book would lament the death of the joyful living animal. Second way of interpreting the passage would include an evaluative statement from the scribe of the book in question. To say that what the scribe must have meant by this passage is that the codices or the gospel-books prevent the monks from enjoying themselves too much, would definitely be an overstatement – for one, the scribe might have run at the risk of being severely punished for such unruliness – but it is undeniable that these books would have a certain didactic purpose and as such would not condone any form of perceived immorality.

The proposition of the solution parchment is further supported by various analogies with Latin riddles. In his book on the Old English riddles of the Exeter Book Dieter Bitterli states that „a first and ingenious attempt to read Riddle 28 as a scribal riddle was made in 1982 by Waltraud Ziegler, who grounded her answer, parchment, in a number of analogues to the Latin enigmata“ (Bitterli, 181). Bitterli gives an example in the form of Riddle 24 from the seventh-century Berne collection whose text reads as following:

As long as I live, I bring profit all over the world; but dead, I provide amazing wealth from my body. Stripped of my clothes, stretched fast by a rope, my fleshy parts hang down, cut off with a sword. [5] Afterwards kings hold me in their hands and look at me with wonder, I carry many thousands and yet they weight nothing. (Bitterli, 182)

Similarly to the Exeter Book Riddle 28, we are introduced in the middle section of the text to the process of manufacturing parchment, and in the final third of it the riddle talks about the product of all this toil, a precious book. Thanks to these similarities and the fact that most of the Latin riddles are accompanied by their solutions, it is safe to say that parchment indeed appears to be the most probable of all proposed solutions to this riddle.

Finding solutions to Old English riddles is an extremely tricky venture. Due to the lack of certainty as to the answers, caused most probably by some large-scale monk conspiracy, we may only move within the realm of probability. Almost no answer is off the table, and yet it is so incredibly intricate to find one that would fit at least decently. Scholars who have attempted to solve Riddle 28 have done a marvelous job in approaching the text from all possible angles. There is only one solution, though, which can fit the best. And yes, it is parchment.

Bibliography:

Bitterli, Dieter. Say What I Am Called: The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book and the Anglo-Saxon Riddle Tradition. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009.

„Exeter Riddle ‚Ale‘.“ 24 January 2012, 24 January 2012 <http://teaching.shu.ac.uk/ds/sle/altered/selections/early/aletrans.htm>

Irving,  Edward, B. Jr. „Heroic Experience in the Old English Riddles.“ Old English Shorter Poems: Basic Readings. Ed. K. O’Brien O’Keeffe. Garland, 1994.

„Materials and Techniques of Manuscript Production.“ 23 March 2012. 24 January 2013             <http://web.ceu.hu/medstud/manual/MMM/parchment.html> The website cites as its                  source the following book: De Hamel, Christopher.  Medieval Craftsmen: Scribes and          Illuminators. London: British Museum Press, 1992.

Niles,  J.D.“Old English Enigmatic Poems and the Play of the Texts.“ Brepols (2006): 2.

„Old English Riddles,“ < http://www.csun.edu/~sk36711/WWW/630ML/riddles.pdf>

The text used is taken from the following book: Williamson, Craig. A Feast of Creatures: Anglo-Saxon Riddle Songs. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982.

Williams, Tyler F. “ Resources for Biblical, Theological, and Religious Studies.“ Codex 24 January 2013. 24 January 2013 <http://biblical-studies.ca/>

Wyatt, A. J. ed. Old English Riddles. London: University of Cambridge Press, 1912.

Accessed on the following website: <http://www.www-cass.archive.org/stream/oldenglishriddl00wyat/oldenglishriddl00wyat_djvu.txt>