The Cambridge Old English Reader

A Riddle

Here is a riddle-poem, complete in one line. It is from a collection of nearly one hundred riddles copied out in the early eleventh century in an Anglo-Saxon anthology of verse known as the Exeter Book (see p. 258). It is usually identified as Riddle 69.

Some editors see this not as an independent riddle but as the last line of the previous riddle in the manuscript, but the scribe seems to have separated it and it works very well on its own. It is easy to learn by heart and, importantly for us, is a classic illustration of how OE poetry ‘works’.

To start with the riddle's meaning, most of the vocabulary ought to be familiar or at least guessable by now. Wundor (‘wonder’ or ‘miracle’, pron. u as in ‘full’), wæter (pron. ‘watter’), on and tō are obvious. Weġ (here with the dative inflection -e after on) is ModE ‘way’ and sounds almost like the modern word; and bān (with the dative inflection -e after tō; pron. ‘bahn-eh’) has followed the pattern of long-vowel modification that we have met before (e.g. stān, ‘stone’) and has become ModE ‘bone’.

That leaves the verb wearð, used twice and crucial in the riddle. The pronunciation is ‘weh-arth’, with ea said quickly and the r sounded. We met it first in 2b/7. It is the preterite of (ġe)weorþan (see p. 11), whose broad spectrum of meaning encompasses the verbs ‘become / come about / turn to / happen /occur’: some sort of process or a step in a sequence of events is always implied. The verb is also used as an alternative to wæs in sentences such as þæt scip wearþ ġefylled, ‘the ship was filled’. The verb's semantic flexibility allows it to be used very effectively in the riddle, but unfortunately we no longer have it in ModE, and so must use two different verbs from the spectrum: ‘happen’ and ‘turn to’ fit the bill. Thus we have: