4 - Deope gedolgod: Wounding and Shaping in Riddles 53 and 73

Summary

Riddles 53 and 73 depict flourishing trees being cut down and shaped into objects by ‘enemies’. Most of the scholarly attention given to these two riddles has been invested in finding their solutions – a task that has proved particularly difficult for the ambiguous Riddle 53. This focus means that the pathos of the riddles’ narratives, which involve the trees being wounded and changed from their natural states, tends to be overlooked. Recent scholarship, however, suggests there is much to be learned about depictions of and attitudes towards trees in early medieval poetry. In a recent publication, Michael Bintley discusses the depiction of trees in the Poetic Edda and argues that ‘literatures both ancient and modern indicate human knowledge and understanding of plants as being comparable with humans, with a similar capacity to endure pain, suffering, and loss, in both metaphorical and literal terms’. The ‘realm of poetry and the imagination’, writes Bintley, allows readers to ‘participate in the sensory and emotional experience of non-humans’.

In this chapter, I wish to draw attention to the literal narratives of Riddles 53 and 73 and emphasise their importance for what they reveal about early medieval attitudes towards the natural world and humanity's use of its materials. These attitudes resonate with the concerns of modern ecotheologians and ecocritics regarding the intrinsic value of nature. The tree riddles, in particular Riddle 53, not only depict their subjects within a post-lapsarian dystopia but draw connections between the integrity of the tree in its natural environment and its role as an object in the hands of humans. The emphasis on the trees’ early life and initial wholeness, I suggest, produces a conflict in the riddles between the trees’ natural integrity and their potential value as objects.

The riddles’ emphasis on a natural object's wholeness is strikingly at odds with the importance placed on the ‘end product’ in early Christian thought. A metaphor from Augustine's In epistolam Iohannis, for example, imagining God's love of sinners to be like the carpenter's love for the potentiality of his material, suggests trees are valued for their future use as objects, just as humans must be considered for their spiritual potential.