5 - fruman agette eall of earde: The Principle of Accountability in Riddle 83

Summary

Riddle 83 depicts its subject, ore, being taken out of the earth by miners and turned into money, when it can then enact a form of revenge on humans through the establishment of hæftnyd ‘captive bonds’ (Riddle 83, 9b). The writer employs a human social metaphor of ancestral usurpation and destruction; the narrator's ancestors, its fromcynn, are removed from their eard ‘land’ by a fah ‘hostile one’ (Riddle 83, 7a–8a and 4b). This metaphor, in part, leads Marie Nelson to argue that ‘[the subject's] humanity is more discernible than its identity’ and to propose that the answer to the enigma is ‘human being’. I suggest that, despite the riddle writer's use of the human social metaphor, Riddle 83 more readily invites an ecocentric, as opposed to anthropocentric, reading. In its depiction, through the use of metaphor, of the removal of ore, the riddle speaks to two of Buell's tenets of environmental texts. These tenets are that ‘human accountability to the environment is part of the text's ethical orientation’ and that ‘the nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history’. The text implicates humanity in the ore's destruction and claims that the ore has its own history, a history that is destroyed by the violent actions of human beings. Ore sees itself as ‘a creature of unstable history, easily undone’, to borrow a phrase from Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's study. In this chapter, I discuss the ecological underpinnings of Riddle 83, connecting humanity's use of its resources to the post-lapsarian relationship between humans and nature. In doing so, I also compare the riddle to the depiction of mining in Job 28.1–11, which has been celebrated for its ecological underpinnings but which is substantially more anthropocentric than Riddle 83. Having discussed the removal of ore from the ground, my discussion leads finally to the return of the resource to the ground and the parallel lives of humans and ore, as depicted in Beowulf. Just as the dragon ‘slumbers atop a hoard of precious objects in a mound (beorh) built by a vanished nation’ so ‘Beowulf's cremated remains will be laid to rest within a similar earthwork’.