The Cambridge Old English Reader

The making of wise observations on life, derived from experience and modified by reflection on that experience, and the formal (often formulaic) expression of these in song or poem, were part of the oral inheritance of the Anglo-Saxons and continued to have an essential place in their literature. Even the eponymous hero of Beowulf must find time for reflection before he performs his great deeds: ‘fate proceeds always as it must’, he announces before fighting Grendel, and ‘it's better that a man avenge his friend than mourn much’, before taking on Grendel's mother. Such sayings, whether we call them ‘maxims’ (the term usually applied to sayings with an ethical dimension) or ‘gnomes’ (more descriptive sayings) or ‘aphorisms’ (any wise or sententious sayings), pervade much of OE literature.

There are two poems – known rather drearily as Maxims I and Maxims II – which are built entirely of such material; the second of the two begins this section (Text 33). Social regulation seems to be at least part of the purpose of such poems. They make sage and incisive comments on the world and its people, using the ordinary and the obvious to impart to their audience a sense of the necessary order of things. Closely related to maxims in their form are so-called ‘proverbs’, but they take a more robustly independent view of the world and express their truths through metaphor. As the OE collection known as the Durham Proverbs shows (Text 34), this is a more cunning and more subversive, and often humorous, method.

Humour is a natural ingredient also, though not the only one, in many of the OE Riddles. Riddling is an active process of reflection, in which the mind is forced to participate in liberating dislocations of imagined experience; like maxims and proverbs, riddles direct us towards social and existential truths, but they do so with forensic intensity, erecting elaborate structures of double meaning and exploiting paradox as they scrutinise the things of the world and the creatures (including us) which inhabit it. A selection of five riddles is given below (Text 35).