Old English Riddles

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mean"guardian of the loaf’ and "kneader of bread." 5 The ambiguity implicitly evokes agender-role confusion, as the woman takes on both male and female traits, acting as boththe "kneader" and the "guardian."Besides confusing social roles, the riddles also play games with religious doctrine.The bell, Bible and horn riddles allude to Christian beliefs and pracrices. In the bellriddle, double entendre operates to turn a religious act, (the ringing of the church bell tosignal a divine office), into a metaphor for sexual bondage . Spel (12b) may refer to ahymn, but it could also refer to the story of the thane and his slave partaking in bed-breaking activities.6 Parodies of the creation myth occur in the Bible and hom riddles,which specifically point out the disparity between divine creation and human artifice. Inboth, the human craftsman usurps the place of a heavenly creator and reshapes naturalcreations so he can add them to his material hoard. In the horn riddle, the man whohollows out the horn and fills the shell with ink replaces the meotud (6b) who originallyshaped the antler, undoing the creator’s work. To symbolize its transformation intounsceafta, (Zla) literally "uncreations," the hom moves from under the wood, theholt (4b) that once covered it, to a new position on top of the wood (the wude of thetable), as if gravity reverses during the horn’s transformation from antler to ink-holder.In describing their unnatural transformations, the man-made objects speak as if theywere trapped in a liminal state between life and death. The horn contrasts the glory of5 williamson, A Feast of creatures: Anglo-saxon Riddle-Songs (phitadelphia,Pennsylvania: University of North Carolina press, 1977), p. 191.6 Brignt, p. 468. The OE spe/ refers to either a spiritual homily or a philosophicalargumenl, or else to a narralive history.3

its former days with the painful, nightmarish place where it is stuck. Recalling theglories of its life as an antler, the ink-hom reminisces about how he used to standupright at his brother’s side "united together ... in combat." (18a-b) A once-proudwarrior telling his war stories, the hom echoes the anhogc in "The Wanderer." Likethe Wanderer, the horn, elaborating upon its "brotherless" state, describes itself as aloner in man’s world - gumcynnes langa ofer eorTan. (9b-10a) Lamenting its eclipsefrom the stafuo/ atop the elk’s head (laa) and separation from a battle-friend, 7 thehallucinating hom finds an almost macabre pleasure in its metapmorphosis, decribing itshollowed-out belly as blac lwon ond wundorlic. (L0b-1la)Another instance of un-creation occurs in riddle 43, where the goat hide undergoesa perverse kind of baptism when the "enemy" (1a) dips the skin in water afterslaughtering the goat. In the instant of transcription, the dead creature experiences afantastic resurrection as the craftsmen turn it into a beautiful holy object.s Themiracle occurs exactly in the middle of the riddle (marked by the semi-colon after line13a). At this point, the voice turns suddenly from the concrete earthly concems ofspreddropum (8a) and sweartlast (1la) to the abstract virtues of "salvation," (19b)"generosity" (25b) and "grace," (25a) as the tone shifts abrubtly from colloquial tohomiletic, (signalled the didactic py ...py parataxical technique in lines l9a-Ztb).Delighting in its new-found power, the riddle voice echoes the word that a priest mightsay at the pulpit. konically, in the middle of the sernon about intangible spiritualqualities, the speaker in line 23b adds material wealth, tyr ond ead, to the list of greatthings the book will bring to mankind.Such a dichotomy leads straight to the uncanny, since the uncanny arises from ashift in the perception of a particular object. In the Bible riddle, the uncanny receives itsmost vivid expression at the instant of the hide’s transformation into parchment: Thefamiliar woodland landscape turns into a gothic wood where a disembodied bird’s wing,(ironically referred to in tine 7b by the kenning "wind-blown joy" - fugles wyn),dribbles a stream of black liquid that it swallowed from a stream onto the page. The7 Th" inkhorn’s lamentation about its separation from its brother echoes lhe words oflheanhoga in the elegy "The Wanderer," which describes the desolation of a man who haslost his lord. Bright, p. 323.8 Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious , trans. James Strachey (New York:W.W. Norton & Co., 1960), p.78. Freud notes that a common technique of jokes (here, aparody of religion) is the mingling of beauty and ugliness. He also notes that "jokes admit themost violent contradictions." (p.34)4