3 - Identity, Affirmation, and Resistance in the Exeter Riddle Collection

Summary

Abstract

The Exeter riddle collection imagines voices for the Earth community. The bird riddles (6 and 7) exploit similarities between human and avian behaviors to affirm the intrinsic worth of the Earth community even when it makes humans uncomfortable. The horn riddles (12 and 76) give voice to other-than-human beings celebrating their participation in heroic culture: these riddles imagine that animal-objects find pleasure and purpose in their “work”, despite removal from their natural state. However, the wood-weapon riddles (3, 51, and 71) reveal an awareness that conscription into human service is not always in the best interest of the other-than-human. These thematic clusters suggest an interest in the inherent worth, active voice, and purpose of the non-human natural world.

Keywords: animal studies, animal consciousness, corvids, weaponry

In her recent volume on The Natural World in the Exeter Book Riddles, Corrinne Dale argues that the collection provides “an ethics of human-nature interaction,” rather than any explicit attempt at nature poetry, as Stopford Brooke once suggested. Whereas Aldhelm's Anglo-Latin enigmata, a nearcontemporaneous collection of riddles, “may show the careful attention to nature of a naturalist,” Dale suggests that the Exeter riddle collection reveals instead “a particular interest in the natural origins of [human]- made objects.” Reading the riddles alongside modern ecotheological texts, as I have done with the wisdom poems, Dale identifies a “programme of resistance to anthropocentrism in the Exeter Book riddle collection.” Acknowledging the long tradition of anthropocentric readings of the riddles, Dale's book seeks “to negotiate these readings, understand their reasoning, and seek alternative methods of understanding […] in order to examine what is usually overlooked”—that is, the other-than-human actors in these riddles. Jennifer Neville has suggested that early medieval English audiences, too, sought multiple simultaneous readings for their riddles: she shows that “continuing the interpretive process past an initial answer” was an essential part of the Old English riddling tradition in and beyond the Exeter Book. Neville suggests that, for the original early medieval English audience of Riddle 7, for instance, “recognizing the cuckoo is merely the beginning of the story,” the first step in identifying a broad “interpretive space that is not necessarily bound to be filled.”