Several textual moments in the Vercelli Book have some similarity to the rhetoric of riddles. This chapter illustrates their conformity to a larger pattern in that manuscript’s texts, a pervasive engagement with conditional revelation that promotes what the author calls ‘enigmatic knowing’: a form of access to discourses of authority that stands in radical contrast to those that characterise modern academic structures of thought about similar problem-solving tasks. Many Vercelli Book poems and homilies show a preoccupation with revelation of truth only through the effort or virtue required to obtain privileged understanding; they posit a structuring of information or knowledge whereby signs inscrutable to many nevertheless contain what is needed to interpret them correctly, provided that their interpreters bring the proper ethical orientations and address themselves to the challenge with a spirit of responsibility. Such narratives of revelation often play out through rhetorical engagements with wisdom, celebrations of paradox, and scenes of intellectual confrontation that intersect the discursive mode of riddles in numerous ways.

Paul Strohm, both a biographer of Chaucer and a Chaucerian literary critic, meditates on what Chaucer might come to mean for those engaged with his life and poetic works. In a personal reflection on writing about this medieval clerk and poet, Strohm explores the identification or transference that can occur during an intense study of an author, generating new insights into how our emotional investments are implicated in our ‘relationship’ with an author.

The chapter examines the crucial role that conceptual blending plays in Anhaga (R.5) and Wæpnum Awyrged (R.20). In both riddles, the weapon or piece of armour is (partly) visualised as a warrior who serves his lord and fights in battle, yet the precise cognitive processes that underlie this visualisation and that lead to the ‘proper’ solutions are different. Wæpnum Awyrged forms an asymmetrical double-scope network in which culture-sensitive metaphorical and metonymic connections between the conceptual fields ‘warrior’ (input 1 or source domain) and ‘sword’ (input 2 or target domain) are activated. Anhaga, on the other hand, suggests the presence of multi-scope conceptual blending, as its vague textual details allow multiple target domains and thus multiple solutions. This chapter demonstrates that such a multiplicity of solutions ultimately stems from the diversity of ways in which humans think and process information.

This chapter offers a new reading of a selection of Exeter Riddles. The Riddles speak to each other; they often come in larger thematic clusters, sometimes in pairs and triads, and oppositional groups. Like spolia, they gain their meaning and allure from juxtaposition, mystery, and elusiveness, and they contain multitudes in a small space. The chapter identifies a ‘plunder cluster’ within the collection, consisting of, at least, Riddles 14 (‘Horn’), 20 (‘Sword’), and 29 (‘Moon and Sun’. Then it proceeds to four other Riddles, numbered 49, 40, 60, and 95 (‘Bookcase/Oven’, ‘Creation’, ‘Creation’, ‘Book’), that, like Beowulf, ponder accumulation. The selected Exeter Riddles begin to reveal traces of a sophisticated ars poetica, at once playful and deeply serious, that conceives of texts as remnants that paradoxically communicate while holding back.

Recent studies of Exeter Book riddles and Old English literature have begun to reveal their ecological underpinnings, drawing on ecocriticism to explore the relationship between human beings and the rest of the created world. There is still much to explore in this growing field, including the relationship between the oppression of the natural world and the oppression of women. This chapter discusses Old English texts from an ecofeminist perspective, exploring the representation of, and forging links between, these two oppressed groups. It suggests that, where texts like The Wife’s Lament and The Order of the World depict both nature and women as dominated by an androcentric and anthropocentric worldview, a number of Exeter Book riddles challenge such depictions, offering us, for example, the depiction of water as both a feminine natural force and a celebrated monstrous female that is sellic (‘wonderful’) and freolic (‘free’). Drawing on recent ecofeminist scholarship in the field of eco-theology, this chapter suggests that certain riddles, including Modor Monigra (R.84), interrogate the human- and male-centred nature of wisdom and free early medieval women and the natural world from patriarchal oppression.

Many Exeter Book riddles refer to the primordial phenomenon that enables human life—fire—and the duplicate texts of Legbysig (R.30a) and Ligbysig (R.30b) are no exception. There is a wide consensus that the solution to the riddle is ‘tree or cross’, first suggested by F. A. Blackbaum in 1901. That solution fits very well with the text, which even refers to ‘a blooming grove’ (4a). Blackbaum’s solution depends on understanding the materiality of a tree and cross, the latter created out of the former. Although such a comparison of the tangible world and the fictional world represented in the approach is used widely in Old English studies to explore material culture in poetry, this chapter argues that focusing on materiality, especially on the function and sensory experience of materials, can lead to new interpretations of literary texts. Using an approach from material culture studies to discuss the role of sensory experience in materiality of fire in Legbysig, this chapter offers a new solution, ora (‘ore’, ‘metal in its unreduced state’).

Computus and riddles are not obvious bedfellows, but the Bern and Eusebius riddle collections include several original enigmata on computistical and astronomical subjects. How these riddles fit into the tradition inherited from Symphosius, what kinds of literary devices they employ, and why riddles should be an appropriate medium for communicating these subjects, are the central questions of this chapter. Frequently, these riddles represent their subjects in terms of familial relations. Some are harmonious: Bern Enigma 62 depicts the stars as sisters and the heavens as a monastery. More often, familial relations are problematic. For example, in Bern Enigma 56, the sun and moon are siblings whose complicated calendrical relationship is imagined as one of incestuous nativity. Several riddles play with the apparent paradox between the moon as it is observed and as it is measured. Bern Enigma 59 illustrates how the imperceptible movements of the moon can nevertheless be measured in fractions. Most notable of all is the unusual description of the saltus lunae (‘leap of the moon’) intercalation in Eusebius Enigma 29, which combines the sibling trope with complex calculations originating in Irish computistica.

Stephen Knight offers an array of new material from nineteenth-century media (newspapers and magazines) made accessible by the digitisation of archival records. Knight showcases extraordinary examples of extra-canonical Chaucer reception that highlight the emerging literary proclivities of the reading public, and the interest of nineteenth-century editors in re-presenting Chaucer’s works to larger audiences and targeting specific groups: women, children, the well-read. These newly available sources open up avenues for further enquiry into the roots of modern medievalism.

This chapter concerns itself with Andreas, a poetic version of the apocryphal narrative about the Apostle Andrew’s journey to Mermedonia, an island of cannibals, and his subsequent martyrdom and conversion of Mermedonians. Two clear examples of architectural spolia emerge in the Old English poem, diverging greatly from its analogues. In the first scene, Jesus animates an angel sculpture in a Jerusalem temple to manifest his divinity. In the second passage, Andrew speaks to a stone pillar in his prison cell, causing it to issue a flood that drowns – and baptises – the violent Mermedonians. Both artefacts come to life thanks to powerful figures, Jesus and Andrew, who function as the author’s alter egos as they animate artefacts from the past. The larger pattern in Andreas of material fragments in search of a new integration occurs twice more: in the hero’s bodily fragmentation caused by the Mermedonians, and the metatextual excursus in which the narrator speaks of presenting the material ‘lytlum sticcum’ [in little bits]. Far from reading Andreas as an incompetent poem, this chapter argues that attending to spolia and other textual and physical fragments found in the text helps us uncover a sophisticated, self-conscious poetics behind the work.