3 - wrætlic weorc smiþa: Inverting the Colophon in Riddle 26

Summary

Riddle 26 depicts an animal being killed by a human craftsman – the feond ‘enemy’ of its opening line – and its skin being used to make a Bible. Neville calls the treatment of the animal and its hide ‘a successful exercise of human power over the natural world’, and the dominant actions of the human over the passive hide – submerging, cutting, binding and depriving the animal of strength – certainly suggest this. Rather than discussing Riddle 26 in terms of an active–passive postlapsarian relationship between humanity and nature, however, my ecological reading will focus on what I see as the riddle's more immediate concern with animal origins and materiality. I propose that Riddle 26 prioritises the animal and the material element of book production above the human and the spiritual, offering an inversion of the traditional colophon, with its information about the scribe and his endeavors, and challenging anthropocentric views on the nature of the book-making craft. It is hard to disagree with Bruce Holsinger when he writes that Riddle 26's Bible ‘originates not from the words of the prophets, or from the inspiration of God, but from the flayed hide of the animal who gave its life and endured only as the ink-stained page of the book’.

Bibles were often beautiful works of art, created by craftsmen whose contribution was sometimes recorded in a colophon. With its adornments of gold, silver and jewels, Riddle 26 calls its Bible the wrætlic weorc smiþa ‘wondrous work of craftsmen’ (Riddle 26, 14a), similarly paying tribute to its human makers. However, in order for the beautiful object to be made, an animal must first be skinned and that skin put through various stages of treatment, including wetting, drying and the removal of impurities. So, whilst the riddle acknowledges the work of the craftsman, it also promotes the book's animal origins, placing its focus first on the animal rather than on human achievement. In doing so it both complies with Buell's notion that, in an ecocritical text, the ‘human interest is not understood to be the only legitimate interest’, and playfully contests Ambrose's assertion that ‘principium artis ars ipsa, ex qua artificum diuersorum deinceps coepit operatio’ (‘The beginning of a work of art lies in the craft itself, which is the source of the individual skills of a series of craftsmen’).