elcome!
Please Note! As of February 15, 2004 these pages are still under development and there are gaps in content and design. I now expect it will be a continuing process. Right now the texts and translations should be reliable. And the bibliograpical department is more complete than any other I know. I had hoped to complete making the notes in Williamson's edition available, but handling them as graphics has serious problems and scanning them as text does too . There will be more papers and essays available by September. 

T his is the home page of the Kalamazoo Riddle Group. We plan to make it a comprehensive web site for those interested in the Riddles of the Exeter Book with supplementary features relating to the "riddling" aspects of lyrics of any time or place. Our conviction is that the Riddles of the Exeter Book are worthy of the interest and respect due all the wonderful creations of the human spirit.

Listed below are the departments ready to receive visitors. These will be enhanced and others added as time and resources make possible. Currently, it is being developed by William F. Klein, a member of the English department at Kenyon College, email: klein@kenyon.edu.

T his site will be growing every week this semester, so please check back. I would particularly appreciate corrections, suggestions and addresses of other relevant sites.

I. For the history and activites of the Riddle Group at the recent International Congresses on Medieval Studies please click on Kalamazoo. We are in the process of providing access to the papers read at the meetings. The links will be the authors last name, highlighted.

II. For access to the texts of the Riddles accompanied by translations, please click on Texts. The file for each Riddle now includes Williamson's text and his translations in A Feast of Creatures.

Three different kinds of "introductions" to the Riddles are now availble on this site. I believe that Craig Williamson's critical discussion of the "poetic" of the Riddles represents the high water mark of a synthesizing study of the Riddles by a single person since Frederick Tupper. It also raises the matter of the "poetic" of the Riddles that has fascinated readers since Tupper and most recently Daniel Tiffany in Critical Inquiry (see "Lyric Substance: On Riddles, Materialism, and Poetic Obscurity," QI 28: Autumn 2001). I have been experimenting with formatting this work to see if pure text on that scale can be made "Web" readable. I call the result "analytical formatting" in which the structure of the exposition is reflected in the layout and coloring of the text. I would appreciate reactions to the experiment. Click on the link provided here: A
Feast of Creatures: Anglo-Saxon Riddle Songs.

Besides the texts and some notes from Williamson's edition of the Riddles (The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book, Chapel Hill, 1977) his "Introduction" is also now available; click on Introduction. The laborious process of making the "Glossary" to this edition is coming along. You can access what is currently available by clicking on Glossary.

This year I hope to have available here a collection of "Basic Readings" in the scholarship on the Riddles. A more distanct hope is the idea of making avaible important essays and the collective work of important scholars. I am thinking, for example, of Marie Nelson, who has a impressive collection of essays scattered in various locations which she is unlikely to be able to publish. More could be done than we have found time to do it. Still . . .

III. For a bibliography supplementary to that provided in Craig Williamson edition The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book, please click on Listing. The chronological listing is supplemented by an alphabetical list of Authors and a list of Journals in which more than two articles on the Riddles have appeared since 1975.

IV. At the Riddle Session in Kalamazoo, May 2001, one topic of discussion was the need to provide teachers working at all levels of education ready access to the Riddles. The very first and very preliminary steps are now being made. We hope these beginnings will lead to a rich array of suggestions for use of the Riddles in the College Classroom and will also provide texts, translations and commentary in forms and packages readily printed and available for unrestricted copying. To look at the first step in that direction click on Teaching.


V. A list of important and useful web sites could become substantial, I presume. But let us begin with the most obvious one:

1.) The Labyrinth: Resources For Medieval Studies