Black and White and Read All Over: The Exeter Book Riddles

In this short Subcast episode, I wish to engage your help!  The Anglo-Saxons loved riddles and nearly a hundred survive.  Here are four.  I'd love to hear your answers!


Often I war with waves, battle the winds,

strive against both at once, meaning to find

the ground wave-covered.

Home is estranged from me—

I am strong of struggle, if stilled.

If I fail, they are stronger than me,

and, tearing me, immediately rout,

wishing to whisk away what I must ward.

I may withstand them, if my tail is tough

and the stones allow me to hold fast

against unrelenting force. Ask what I am called. 

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A moth ate words. It seemed to me

a strange occasion, when I inquired about that wonder,

that the worm swallowed the riddle of certain men,

a thief in the darkness, the glorious pronouncement

and its strong foundation. The stealing guest was not

one whit the wiser, for all those words he swallowed.  

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I saw four wondrous creatures

travelling together; dark were their tracks,

their footprints very black. Swift was their journey,

faster than birds, flying through the breeze,

diving under the waves. Restless it wrought,

a struggling warrior who points out their ways

over decorated gold, all four of them. 

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I am a wonderful thing, a pleasure

to women, useful to the neighbors—

I am harmless to the villagers,

except to my slayer alone.

My shaft is lofty, I stand over the bed,

shaggy below someplace or other.

Sometimes a churl’s daughter,

proud-minded woman, quite sexy,

dares to grapple me,

molesting me by the redness,

ravishing my head,

affixing me in her fastness.

She feels my forcing

right away, she who

approaches me,

a woman with braided locks.

Her eye will be wet— 

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Music: "Rejoice" (G.F. Handel) perf. Advent Chamber Orchestra
Text: Muir, Bernard James, ed. The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry, 1994.