Exeter Book Riddle 48, Line 7b

2021 ◽  
Vol 81 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-167
Author(s):  
Robert Getz
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Exeter Book ◽  
Plural Form

Abstract The emendation of the manuscript reading beþuncan to beþencan in line 7b of the Exeter Book’s Riddle 48 has been widely accepted. The Old English Dialogues, however, provide evidence that a strong passive participle beþuncen had been introduced into the paradigm of the weak verb beþencan (to entrust) in the Mercian dialect, admitting the possibility that beþuncan is a genuine preterite plural form. The passive participle brungen, attested in Mercian, is a possible analogical basis for the development of beþuncen in the same dialect, from which other strong forms may subsequently have arisen. The meter and the motives for scribal alteration in Riddle 48 make it probable that beþuncan is original and that it is rather ongietan in line 6a that should be emended.

The Exeter Book Riddles: authorship and transmission

2015 ◽  
Vol 44 ◽  
pp. 131-162
Author(s):  
Peter Orton
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Exeter Book ◽  
English Verse

AbstractThe Exeter Book Riddles are anonymous, and the generally formulaic character of all Old English verse discourages attempts to establish unity or diversity of authorship for them; but correlations between the sequence of Riddles in the manuscript and the recurrence from poem to poem of aspects of form, content (including solutions), presentation and style sometimes suggest common authorship for particular runs of texts, or reveal shaping episodes in the collection's transmission. Investigation along these lines throws up clear differences between the two main blocks of Riddles (1–59 and 61–95), and evidence emerges that the composition of many (at least) of Riddles 61–95 was influenced by a reading of Riddles 1–59.

Old English

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Burns ◽  
Colleen Curran ◽  
Kaifan Yang ◽  
Niamh Kehoe ◽  
Emma Knowles ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Manuscript Studies ◽  
Exeter Book ◽  
Section 8 ◽  
Junius Manuscript ◽  
Vercelli Book

Abstract This chapter has eleven sections: 1. Bibliography; 2. Manuscript Studies, Palaeography, and Facsimiles; 3. Cultural and Intellectual Contexts; 4. Literature: General; 5. The Poems of the Exeter Book; 6. The Poems of the Vercelli Book; 7. The Poems of the Junius Manuscript; 8. Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript; 9. Other Poems; 10. Prose; 11. Reception. Sections 1, 9, and 11 are by Eleni Ponirakis; section 2 is by Rachel Burns and Colleen Curran; sections 3, 4, and 10 are by Margaret Tedford; section 5 is by Niamh Kehoe; section 6 is by Rafael J. Pascual; section 7 is by Emma Knowles; section 8 is by Rachel Burns and Kaifan Yang.

Old English Ecotheology

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Courtney Catherine Barajas
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Exeter Book ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
The Earth ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
The Impact

Old English Ecotheology examines the impact of environmental crises on early medieval English theology and poetry. Like their modern counterparts, theologians at the turn of the first millennium understood the interconnectedness of the Earth community, and affirmed the independent subjectivity of other-than-humans. The author argues for the existence of a specific Old English ecotheology, and demonstrates the influence of that theology on contemporaneous poetry. Taking the Exeter Book as a microcosm of the poetic corpus, she explores the impact of early medieval apocalypticism and environmental anxiety on Old English wisdom poems, riddles, elegies, and saints' lives.

Old English Ecotheology

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Courtney Catherine Barajas
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Exeter Book ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
The Earth ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
The Impact

This book examines the impact of environmental crises on early medieval English theology and poetry. Like their modern counterparts, theologians at the turn of the first millennium understood the interconnectedness of the Earth community, and affirmed the independent subjectivity of other-than-humans. The author argues for the existence of a specific Old English ecotheology, and demonstrates the influence of that theology on contemporaneous poetry. Taking the Exeter Book as a microcosm of the poetic corpus, she explores the impact of early medieval apocalypticism and environmental anxiety on Old English wisdom poems, riddles, elegies, and saints' lives.

The ‘dark Welsh’ as slaves and slave raiders in Exeter Book riddles 52 and 721

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lindy Brady
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Early Period ◽  
Exeter Book ◽  
Regional Culture ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Social Division ◽  
Cattle Raiding ◽  
Slave Traders ◽  
The Common ◽  
Common Perception

Chapter three argues that a group of Old English riddles located in the borderlands between Anglo-Saxon England and Wales reflect a common regional culture by depicting shared values of a warrior elite across the ostensible Anglo-Welsh divide. These riddles, which link the ‘dark Welsh’ to agricultural labour, have long been understood to depict the Welsh as slaves and thus reflect Anglo-Saxon awareness of both ethnic and social division. Drawing upon understudied Welsh legal material, this chapter argues that these riddles have a multilayered solution in which the Welsh are both slaves and slave traders, complicating readings of negative Anglo/Welsh relations. This polysemic solution reveals that the Welsh, like the Anglo-Saxons, were stratified by class into the enslaved and a warrior elite with less distance from the Anglo-Saxons than has been understood. The location of these riddles on the mearc further characterises the Welsh borderlands in the early period as a distinctive region which was notorious for cattle raiding. These riddles counter the common perception that the Welsh borderlands were defined by Offa’s Dyke, suggesting that this region is better understood as a space which both Anglo-Saxons and Welsh permeated on raids.

The Old English Epic of Redemption: The Theological Unity of MS Junius 11

Traditio ◽  
1976 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 185-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. R. Hall
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Exeter Book ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Chronological Sequence ◽  
Junius 11 ◽  
Vercelli Book

Anglo-Saxon scribes were compilers and organizers as well as copyists. Each major Old English literary manuscript gives evidence of editorial planning. The Beowulf codex was apparently designed as a collection of marvelous tales; the Vercelli Book as a collection of legendary and homiletic matter; and the first three poems of the Exeter Book (Christ I, II, and III) were arranged in proper chronological sequence.

The origin of the Exeter Book of Old English poetry

1996 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 135-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Gameson
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Critical Edition ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Exeter Book ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Vernacular Literature ◽  
Old English Poetry ◽  
The Third ◽  
English Verse

Exeter, Cathedral Library, 3501, fols. 8–130, the celebrated Exeter Book of Old English Poetry, preserves approximately one-sixth of the surviving corpus of Old English verse, and its importance for the study of pre-Conquest vernacular literature can hardly be exaggerated. It is physically a handsome codex, and is of large dimensions for one written in the vernacular: c. 320 × 220 mm, with a written area of c. 240 × 160 mm (see pl. III). In contrast to many coeval English manuscripts, particularly those in the vernacular, there is documentary evidence for the Exeter Book's pre-Conquest provenance. Assuming it is identical with the ‘i mycel Englisc boc be gehwilcum þingum on leoðwisum geworht’ (‘one large English book about various things written in verse’) in the inventory of lands, ornaments and books that Leofric, bishop of Crediton then Exeter, had acquired for the latter foundation, then it has been at Exeter since the third quarter of the eleventh century. This, however, is at least three generations after the book was written, and it has generally been assumed that it originated else where. Identifying the scriptorium where the Exeter Book was made is clearly a matter of the greatest interest and importance. A recent, admirably thorough monograph has put forward a thought-provoking case for seeing Exeter itself as the centre responsible, and has proceeded to draw a range of literary and historical conclusions from this. The comprehensive new critical edition of the manuscript has favoured the thesis, and it has been echoed elsewhere. If correct, this is extremely valuable and exciting – but is it correct? The matter is of sufficient importance to merit further scrutiny.

A Poem of the Cross in the Exeter Book: ‘Riddle 60’ and ‘The Husband's Message’

Traditio ◽  
1967 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 41-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. E. Kaske
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Exeter Book ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Old English Poetry ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Christian Thought ◽  
Disproportionate Number ◽  
To Come

To propose a unified religious allegory in what hitherto has been accepted rather generally as two distinct Old English poems, and universally as secular poetry carrying no meaning beyond the literal, is to risk being categorized as a ‘pan-allegorist’ in literary theory and an evangelist in temperament. Let me begin, therefore, by protesting that if the corpus of Old English poetry should ever be unmasked as a series of impeccably Christian allegories, no one will be more astounded or dismayed than I. It would be difficult to deny, however, that the great scholars who laid the foundations for our study of this poetry were, in most instances, more interested in Germanic antiquity than in Latin Christianity; and that as a result, a disproportionate number of our own major discoveries are likely to come out of the once-neglected Patrologia Latina. If this observation is accurate, we may do well to suspend temporarily our belief in certain universal negative conclusions—like, for example, the familiar pronouncement that Old English poets characteristically do not employ allegory—and to inquire whether some of the ‘secular’ poems that have puzzled us for so long may not become less puzzling in the light of early Christian thought. Much as we may revere the spirit of Germanic antiquity, we shall do it small service by attributing to it attitudes or works that it might not have cared to claim.

Introduction: Early Medieval Earth Consciousness

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Courtney Catherine Barajas
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Exeter Book ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Turn Of The Millennium ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Old English Poetry ◽  
Religious Lyrics ◽  
Broad Audience ◽  
Aelfric Of Eynsham

The existential threat of environmental collapse loomed large in the early medieval English imagination. In particular, the work of Wulfstan, Archbishop of York and Ælfric of Eynsham pointed to the imminence of the apocalypse. Wulfstan explicitly attributed environmental collapse to human sin, while Ælfric urged the faithful to look hopefully to the post-apocalyptic establishment of a new Earth. The broad audience and didactic intent of these prolific and well-connected theologians makes their work a useful representation of English theology at the turn of the millennium. Similarly, the 10th-century manuscript called the Exeter Book—the largest, most diverse extant collection of Old English poetry, including religious lyrics, obscene riddles, and elegies—may serve as a representative of the contemporaneous poetic corpus.

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