The early medieval riddles reveal points of contact with the world in which they were created and with which they still interact today. These interactions occur on many levels: between texts within one manuscript, between collections within an overall tradition, between genres and disciplines within an intellectual tradition, between material cultures separated by time and distance, and between poets during the translation process. The chapters in this section seek to explore a small fraction of the interactions between the riddles of early medieval England and the wider world. Each of these chapters is unique and particular to itself, and cannot be reduced to a single, homogeneous approach, but it is perhaps useful to consider them all as aspects of ‘translation’ in its most basic meaning of ‘carrying across’. Fittingly, the collection ends with a chapter that offers new, creative translations of several Exeter Book riddles and reflects upon translation as a practice.

The second book runs from the political crisis of thewinter of 828/9 to Wala’s death in August 836, butwas written with emphatic hindsight. The generaldrift of the narrative is backward-looking: if therulers had heeded Wala’s advice in the early 830s,the empire would not lie in ruins in the 850s.Radbert had been abbot of Corbie since 843/4. Aboutseven years later he was forced to retire from thisillustrious office. The ex-abbot added a polemicalsecond book to his funeral oration to Wala, in whichhe attacked Wala’s main enemies: the Empress Judith(Justina), the chamberlain Bernard (Naso) and, to alesser extent, Emperor Louis the Pious (Justinian).The second book is set in an imaginary late antiqueChristian empire, and reflects deeply on the lostunity of the Carolingian polity. It is a treasuretrove of political terminology, which was derivedfrom classical and patristic writing but imbued withnew meaning in the turbulent mid-ninth century.

Incongruity is the sine qua non for humour, as any good humour theory will suggest, conjuring up an appropriately inappropriate doubleness. But incongruity alone is never sufficient to explain humour. This chapter brings together consideration of humour theory with the interpretation of Feþegeorn (R.31) to ponder whether riddles can provide a key to understanding the humour of early medieval England. Pinpointing humour always requires an awareness of the multiple frames within which the comic stimulus works. For literary humour, this requires a sensitivity to register (with implicit questions of expectations of genre) as well as to meaning (attending to the doubleness of diction) and to context (since performance and social context plays a significant role). Interpreting humour also requires a fine-tuned sense of the timing of the revelation of doubleness, and here memory plays a significant role, since earlier tellings (of a riddle or of a joke) allow an audience to usefully anticipate the upcoming resolution.

The third chapter brings together socio-economic and penitential discourses in its analysis of the parable of Dives and Lazarus – a story that features a rich man refusing to give alms and his subsequent damnation. The chapter highlights retellings in three story collections arranged around the Seven Deadly Sins – Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne, Peter Idley’s Instructions to his Son, and John Gower’s Confessio Amantis. In all three, the parable is presented as an illustration of gluttony, not avarice as in Luke’s Gospel, seemingly side-stepping the story’s emphasis on social division. The chapter examines how this penitential frame shapes the translated parables and finds two conflicting accounts of how gluttony affects the social body. For both Mannyng and Idley, the parable directs the rich to see beyond their own needs and to more consciously live in community with those in poverty. For Gower, in contrast, the parable prompts the rich to look inward at their uncontrolled desire. By casting the rich man as the primary figure in need, Gower advocates self-governance as means of social reform, effectively erasing the poor from the narrative itself and from his vision of a revitalised community.

David Matthews explores how Caxton’s awareness of linguistic change informed his editing methods. Caxton’s editing of Trevisa's translation of Higden’s Polychronicon, for example, shows a distinct diachronic consciousness and a desire to forge something new out of Trevisa's ‘old’ English. This stands in contrast to his more deferential treatment of Chaucer. Matthews thus differentiates between philology as a tool for understanding another language and as an editorial practice focused on rendering texts transparent.

This chapter proposes a new grouping of Exeter Book riddles which share a semantic and metaphorical interest in ‘craft’ and ‘sound’: the acoustic craft riddles. In these riddles, worked objects speak, ring, and resound, while the practices which transform raw materials into artefacts are often euphonious and resonant in their own right. The soundscape of the craftsman’s workshop – its musical and melodious contexts – and the gifting of sounding voice to worked objects opens up the riddles to a celebration of the most meaningful of all audible human gifts: language, both spoken and written. This chapter explores how the acoustic craft riddles offer us a new critical picture of riddlic textuality which puts the material into a playful and rich relationship with the aural: sound and language can be crafted, like raw materials, in the production of aural artefacts. The riddles do not only rely on the voices of their poets; their linguistic mechanisms presuppose the social and communal value of the text within the word exchange: they leave space for the reader’s own voice to resonate in response and to re-craft solutions and propositions through the shaping power of their own voices.

Elizabeth Robertson brings together Keats’s ‘snail-horn perception’ with medieval theory of the senses, especially optics, and medieval theology, to analyse the first tenuous encounters between Troilus and Criseyde. During their sensually-charged optical exchanges, both physiological and psychological processes are at work to create great emotional force in the text and impact on the text’s readers.

Fear and memory are connected to ideas that are essential to riddles: to what initially appears unknown, shadowy and uncertain, as well as to the experience of recognition and the relief stemming from it. This chapter argues that, because of the nature of the poetic riddle and of Old English riddles in particular, memory and fear are their intrinsic sine qua non. It begins by discussing the ways in which memory and fear are related to the riddle on structural, narrative and meta-textually affective levels, before offering a broad overview of the ways in which fear was understood in medieval Christian thought. Finally, it discusses transformative fear in three Exeter Book riddles: XII Hund Heafda (R.86), solved as ‘One-Eyed Seller of Garlic’; Gryrelic Hleahtor (R.33), solved as ‘Iceberg’; and Nama Min is Mære (R.26), solved as ‘Bible’. Ultimately, the types of fear operating within the Old English riddles lend them a particular capacity to corroborate the early Christian view of seemingly negative experiences that must be understood as positively transformative. Thus at least some of the Old English riddles may be read as miniature lessons and parables of Christian thinking.

Thomas A. Prendergast re-examines the fifteenth-century ‘Beryn’ manuscript, one of numerous continuations of and additions to the Canterbury Tales. Prendergast’s foremost concern is to identify the logic guiding the Beryn-scribe’s addition of this text to the Tales. He argues that the scribe was compelled by an irresistible desire to complete the text of the Canterbury Tales, thus attributing agency to the text itself.

Riddles alter their audiences’ perceptions of familiar objects and phenomena through precisely true yet entirely foreign descriptions. Riddles can be accused of a topsy-turvy inversion of high and low subject matter or of falsely raising the low to the level of the high through so-called inappropriate diction. However, riddles can also be read as meditations, albeit often humorous ones. These short poems force readers to meditate on the wonders of the natural and constructed worlds. This chapter explores how the obfuscation inherent in the genre of the riddle and its poetic diction allows a shift in perspectives so that the wondrous nature of what appears quotidian becomes suddenly, if laughably, visible. Following a discussion of the cultural work of wonder, the chapter focuses on the ‘obscene’ riddles Womb wæs on Hindan (R.37), Wrætlic Hongað (R.44), Banleas (R.45), and In Wincsele (R.54), solved as ‘bellows’, ‘key’, ‘bread dough’, and ‘butter churn’. By insistently resisting the reader’s expectations of what merits poetic description, these riddles create space in which to appreciate the mundane and see past simple ubiquity to these things’, and their makers’, deep and foundational worth to society as a whole.