Introduction

Summary

With its depictions of ploughing, felling, shaping and refining, the Exeter Book riddle collection offers us an insight into the way the Anglo-Saxons perceived their relationship with the rest of creation. In the riddles, humanity is seen taking from the natural world and using its resources to create weapons, clothes, food and other objects for human use. These depictions, with their apparent emphasis on nature's usefulness to mankind, led Frederick Tupper to make the following observation in his 1910 edition of the riddles:

All these riddles, whether the subject be animate or inanimate, have at least one common characteristic, their human interest. This is evinced in a dozen striking ways: but by far the most important of these is a trait of our problems, missing in other collections, but so strongly marked here as to suggest a common origin for many of the riddles – the trait of utility. The riddler may neglect place and form, and color of his subject, but he constantly stresses its uses to mankind. Indeed, men are in the background of every riddle-picture; and the subject is usually viewed in relation to them. The most significant expression of this relation is found in the motif of Comitatus, or personal service of an underling to his lord and master, that forms the dominant idea in many of our poems.

There is, however, another, far less anthropocentric, way to read the riddles. Whilst it is true that the riddles depict ‘man and his works’, often remarking on their subjects’ usefulness to humans,or else using the familiar human world as a point of orientation within a vast, overwhelming cosmos, the riddles also offer an alternative, ecocentric view of their subjects, one that considers the natural origins of manmade products and the individual integrity and personal plight of these useful human resources. In this book, I argue that there is a programme of resistance to anthropocentrism at work in the riddle collection, whereby the riddles challenge human-centred ways of depicting the created world. In doing so, I forge new pathways into riddle analysis and interpretation, drawing on ecocriticism and ecotheology to offer insights into a largely underdeveloped area of Old English scholarship.