Truth Is Trickiest: The Case for Ambiguity in the Exeter Book Riddles seeks to turn the study of Old English riddles away from reductive searches for single answers. In this blog post, author Jennifer Neville reflects on her process of creating the book.
I started thinking about the Exeter Book riddles a long time ago—back in 1991, when I was working on my MA at the University of Toronto. At that time, the riddles were mostly seen as peripheral and trivial—jokes, not proper literature—and a lot of the scholarship on them was simply short notes with proposals for new solutions. That is, other than answering the question, “What am I?”, no one had much to say about them. On the other hand, everyone loved trying to answer the question! I became interested in the way that the riddles demanded our attention and our labour, and I was sure that they wouldn’t have been included in the Exeter Book—our most important collection of Old English poetry—if they were not important.
Time passed. I wrote a book about the representation of the natural world in Old English poetry, and I kept thinking about the riddles. Although they were not the main focus of the book (I wrote a lot more about Beowulf and Genesis A), I found that the ideas arising in the riddles were just as weighty and intellectually interesting as those in mainstream literary texts, and I started talking about those ideas in conference papers and writing about them in articles. Over time, the riddles gradually stopped being seen as peripheral and became accepted as part of the main canon of Old English poetry. It took me a long time, though, to arrive at the argument of this book. Having worked on it for over twenty years, what I came up with now seems, well, blindingly obvious.
Here’s the situation: we have multiple collections of Latin riddles from approximately the same time period, and they usually have solutions, even if they’ve only been added later. The riddles in the Exeter Book, on the other hand, don’t have any solutions. Not only did the original scribe not include them (as headings or in the margins); no one came along and added them later. There are a few runes in the margins that might be hints, but no solutions. At the same time, even though they’re clearly coming out of the same tradition as the Latin riddles, the Old English riddles somehow feel different. That difference, I think, arises because the Old English riddles have a different relationship to solutions. So I say: the proper response to an Exeter Book riddle is not a final answer but an argument. And, as the scholarly record shows, even before people started taking them more seriously, the Exeter Book riddles have been very successful in inspiring arguments!
I have written a lot of words to explain my arguments about the riddles, and I hope that readers will enjoy following (and arguing with) them, but in some ways, I’m most proud of the part of the book that, like the riddles themselves, might initially seem peripheral. Near the end, after I’ve had my say, comes the Appendix. Its subtitle is “The Argument over Solutions,” and in it, I’ve done my best to include every solution that I could find. I’ve arranged them in chronological order and labelled them with the year, so it’s possible to see how some riddles are solved only once, some have solutions that gain and lose popularity over time, and some still elude us. I’m sure I’ve missed some solutions (sorry!), and, of course, there will always be more, but I think that this long list is the best evidence for my argument that it is the nature of the Exeter Book riddles to elicit multiple solutions. It’s not that the scribe made a mistake and forgot the solutions, or that the riddles are defective, or that we’re bad at solving them; rather, it’s that the Exeter Book riddles deliberately exploit ambiguity so that it’s possible to support multiple solutions. That’s the case that my book tries to make.
I love the cover that the University of Toronto Press created for my book. The image comes from the Bayeux Tapestry and is part of a very different story, but when I look at it I see myself in the figure at the bottom, offering up to you, the guests at the table, a variety of exciting things to taste, enjoy, and discuss with your neighbours. “Try this one with the spicy humour,” I suggest, “Or perhaps this sad story of suffering and violence?” I can’t take your comments back to the chefs, who lived over a thousand years ago, but I am delighted to be able to deliver their dishes to you today.
Learn more about Truth Is Trickiest: The Case for Ambiguity in the Exeter Book Riddles
