2 - earfoða dæl: The Groan of Travail in the Ox Riddles

Summary

In her book The Riddle of Creation, Ruth Wehlau asserts that ‘the [Exeter Book] riddles play with torment, turning it into an entertainment’. For Wehlau, the violence in the riddles is a ‘play violence’, whereby ‘creatures are beaten, eaten, tortured, and torn apart in a make-believe version of war and torment’. Read in this way, the depiction of non-human suffering is not to be regarded as sympathetic:

The riddles are not especially sympathetic towards the creatures they depict, such as the ox or the cock and hen, nor is there any attempt to imagine the world from their point of view. The playful exaggerated violence that riddle creatures endure is more like cartoon violence than anything else, while the inanimate objects are, after all, not living and the sympathy that they inspire is as unreal as their suffering.

Wehlau's assertions are as startling as they are anthropocentric. It is true that in the majority of Old English poetry there is no sympathy for the non-human world – as Neville muses, ‘the Seafarer who laments his cold feet does not pity the sea birds with their icy feathers’– but in the Old English riddles, where animals and human resources are described and ruminated on, special consideration is given to the point of view of non-human beings and the injustices they suffer at the hands of humans. To use the words of ecotheologians writing about biblical texts, the riddles ‘may be more sympathetic to the plight […] of Earth than our previous interpretations have allowed’. Read through the sympathetic lens of ecotheology, which considers the point of view of the non-human world and the suffering of the natural world after the Fall, the plight of non-human beings in the riddles becomes very serious indeed. Condemned to a post-lapsarian world of suffering like their human masters, the subjects of the natural world lament their labours and relate narratives of suffering. Reading the riddles in this way, it is impossible to interpret Riddle 72's depiction of the toiling ox as entertaining, unsympathetic or unreal.