Anglo-Saxon riddles

Anglo-Saxon riddles are part of Anglo-Saxon literature. The riddle was a major, prestigious literary genre in Anglo-Saxon England, and riddles were written both in Latin and Old English verse. The most famous Anglo-Saxon riddles are in Old English riddles and found in the tenth-century Exeter Book, while the pre-eminent composer of Latin riddles was the seventh- to eighth-century scholar Aldhelm.

Surviving riddles range from theological and scholarly to comical and obscene and attempt to provide new perspectives and viewpoints in describing the world. Some at least were probably meant to be performed rather than merely read to oneself and give us a glimpse into the life and culture of the era.

The Old English riddles have been much more studied than the Latin ones, but recent work has argued that the two groups need to be understood together as 'a vigorous, common tradition of Old English and Anglo-Latin enigmatography'. Much past work on the Old English riddles has focused on finding and debating solutions, but a new wave of work has started using riddles as a way to study Anglo-Saxon world-views through the critical approaches of eco-criticism.

The earliest attested riddles in Anglo-Saxon England are in Latin, where they are known as enigmata ('enigmas') and formed a thriving literary genre which is likely to have inspired the later collection of vernacular riddles in the Exeter Book. Unlike the Exeter Book riddles, the Anglo-Saxon enigmata are presented in manuscripts with their solutions as their title, and seldom close with a challenge to the reader to guess their solution.

Apparently inspired by the hundred Aenigmata of Symphosius, along with Byzantine literary riddling, the Anglo-Saxon aristocrat, scholar, abbot and bishop Aldhelm composed his own collection of a hundred (hexa)metrical enigmata. He included it in his Epistola ad Acircium, a study of poetry dedicated to one Acircius, understood to be King Aldfrith of Northumbria, and therefore presumably written during his reign (685-704/5); Aldhelm records that his riddles were composed early in his career 'as scholarly illustrations of the principles of Latin versification', and may have been the work where he established his poetic skill in Latin. The letter consists of three treatises:

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