Truth is Trickiest: The Case for Ambiguity in the Exeter Book Riddles

In Exeter Cathedral there is a manuscript (Exeter, Cathedral Library, MS 3501) that was written in the tenth century by one careful, well-trained scribe. It contains some of the most beloved and well-known poems in Old English, but its rationale, meaning, and purpose are a puzzle. It seems fitting, then, that it should end with a collection of
unsolved riddles.

This book sets out to take the Exeter Book riddles as seriously as the
scribe of the Exeter Book did. They are not amusing trifles inserted in leftover spaces; they are a collection of texts presented just as carefully as Cynewulf’s Christ II, the hagiographical Guthlac A and B, and the more famous elegiac masterpieces, The Wanderer and The Seafarer. They are extraordinarily demanding. We cannot simply follow their flow of syllables to a given destination. Like other riddles, they require us
to inspect, dissect, interpret, reinterpret, and then respond – but unlike other riddles, at the end of that process, they offer no guarantee of resolution, no way to validate any response, other than to start again with another round of inspection, dissection, and interpretation. This absence of solutions, I argue, is not simply an accident of manuscript transmission; rather, it is a defining characteristic of these texts and a
key to understanding their place in the Exeter Book. These riddles have clear connections with vernacular traditions of folk riddling, and they undoubtedly arose from the Anglo-Latin tradition of education, but they are not simply jokes, and they are not texts for teaching the young and inexperienced. They call for the skill of an expert, a reader or listener who already understands hagiography, the allegorical techniques
of the Physiologus, the encyclopedic tradition, poetic themes of exile and heroism, runic encryption, and complex theological issues.

In what follows, I approach the riddles through their use of enigmatic tropes: obscure, often metaphorical, and deceptively familiar ways of presenting their subjects. For example, many of the riddles refer to a þegn “servant” and a hlaford “lord.” An audience familiar with Old English poetry will be aware of the value-laden relationship between a
“servant” and a “lord,” but an audience familiar with riddles will also be aware of the implement trope: the presentation of a tool and its user as a servant and a lord (or vice versa). Yet neither awareness grants an easy, certain solution, for these riddles are deliberately inconsistent in their use of figurative language. As one riddle proclaims, Soð is æghwylc / þara þe ymb þas wiht wordum becneð “everything indicated about this
creature with words is true,” but in every case the seeker after truth must recognize and then doubt what has been recognized, much as the successful cracker of one riddle’s runic code must start again when faced with another. Knowing a trope is as dangerous as not knowing it, and so Soð bið swicolost “truth is trickiest”: a response to a text will not be arrived at quickly, and it may be swept away by another as soon as it has been formulated.

Join in the game … if you dare.