Exeter Book Riddle 12

Exeter Book Riddle 12 (according to the numbering of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records)[1] is one of the Old English riddles found in the later tenth-century Exeter Book. Its solution is accepted to be 'ox/ox-hide' (though variations on this theme, focusing on leather objects, have been proposed). The riddle has been described as 'rather a cause celebre in the realm of Old English poetic scholarship, thanks to the combination of its apparently sensational, and salacious, subject matter with critical issues of class, sex, and gender'.[2]

Text and translation

As edited by Krapp and Dobbie, the riddle reads:[3]

Interpretations

The riddle is noted particularly for its rare (and unflattering) depiction of Wealas, a word which either means 'Brittonic people' or 'slaves', or both (Wealas is rendered in Treharne's translation above as 'Welshmen' and the rare but related term wale 'slave-girl ... from Wales'); the precise meanings here have occasioned extensive discussion.[5][6]

The riddle is also noted for its implicit portrayal of sexual desire, which is rare in Old English poetry: the riddle seems to depict a slave and/or ethnically Brittonic person fashioning an object from boiled leather, but certainly does so in ways that evoke sexual activity.[7]

There are a number of early medieval Latin riddles on oxen which stand as analogues to this one.[8]

Editions
  • Krapp, George Philip and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie (eds), The Exeter Book, The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), p. 186, https://web.archive.org/web/20181206091232/http://ota.ox.ac.uk/desc/3009.
  • Williamson, Craig (ed.), The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977).
  • Muir, Bernard J. (ed.), The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry: An Edition of Exeter Dean and Chapter MS 3501, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2000).
  • Foys, Martin et al. (eds.) Old English Poetry in Facsimile Project, (Madison, WI: Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture, 2019-). Online edition annotated and linked to digital facsimile, with a modern translation.

Recordings
  • Michael D. C. Drout, 'Riddle 12', performed from the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records edition (19 October 2007).

References
  1. George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie (eds), The Exeter Book, The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), http://ota.ox.ac.uk/desc/3009 Archived 2018-12-06 at the Wayback Machine.
  2. Peter Robson, '“Feorran Broht”: Exeter Book Riddle 12 and the Commodification of the Exotic', in Authority and Subjugation in Writing of Medieval Wales, ed. by Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)pp. 71-84 (p. 84).
  3. George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie (eds), The Exeter Book, The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), p. 186; http://ota.ox.ac.uk/desc/3009 Archived 2018-12-06 at the Wayback Machine.
  4. Old and Middle English c. 890-c. 1400: An Anthology, ed. by Elaine Treharne, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 69.
  5. John W. Tanke, “Wonfeax wale: Ideology and Figuration in the Sexual Riddles of the Exeter Book”, in Class and Gender in Early English Literature, ed. by Britton J. Harwood and Gillian R. Overing (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 21-42.
  6. Katherine Leah Miller, 'The semantic field of slavery in Old English: Wealh, Esne, Þræl' (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Leeds, 2014), pp. 127-31.
  7. Nina Rulon-Miller, “Sexual Humor and Fettered Desire in Exeter Book Riddle 12”, in Humour in Anglo-Saxon Literature, ed. by Jonathan Wilcox (Cambridge: Brewer, 2000), pp. 99-126.
  8. Cameron Laird, 'Commentary for Riddle 12', The Riddle Ages (7 September 2013).
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