2. The "Learned" Riddles Like the Latin riddles, learned dialogues may have influenced and been influenced by the Exeter Book Riddles. In The Dark Ages, W. P. Ker calls riddles and dialogues "common forms of instruction and literary entertainment which have a large influence on the culture of the Middle Ages."16 Of the dialogue he says: [It] supplied two common rhetorical wants. It was a sort of rhetorical catechism, or a dictionary of poetical synonyms and periphrases, -varieties of kenning, to use the convenient and intelligible Norse name. It might also be the frame of a collection of riddles, which were a favourite exercise for fancy and rhetorical skill combined. 17 The use of riddles (or riddlic metaphors) as an important rhetorical device in medieval dialogue may be seen in Alcuin's eighth-century Latin "Dialogue with Pippin" and in the ninth- or tenth-century Old English dialogue poem, "Solomon and Saturn."

Alcuin was an English churchman, a writer of riddles, master of the York school, and in the late eighth century,Charlemagne's principal educator and head of his palace school at Archen. Alcuin's "Dialogue with Pippin" (Pippin was a son of Charlemagne) shows how the occasional metaphoric play of medieval dialogue could become riddlic. The scholar questions and the boy answers: What is sleep?-The image of death. What is the head?-The crown of the body. What is the body?-The home of the mind. What is the mouth?-The nourisher of the body. What are the teeth?-The millstones of our food. What are the lips?-The doors of the mouth. What is the throat?-The devourer of the food. What are the hands?-The workmen of the body. What is the moon?-The eye of night; the giver of dew; the prophetess of the weather. What are the stars?-The paintings of the summit of nature; the seaman's pilots; the ornaments of night. What is rain?-The earth's conception; the mother of corn. What is a cloud?-The night of day; the labour of the eyes. What is wind?-The perturbation of air; the moving principle of water; the dryer of earth. What is earth?-The mother of the growing; the nurse of the living; the storehouse of life; the devourer of all things. What is a wonder?- I saw a man standing; a dead man walking who never existed. How could this be?-An image in water. *** An unknown person without tongue or voice spoke to me, who never existed before, nor has existed since, nor ever will be again: and whom I neither heard nor knew. ---It was your dream. I saw the dead produce the living, and by the breath of the living the dead were consumed. ---From the friction of [sticks] fire was produced, which consumed them *** Who is he that will rise higher if you take away his head? ---Look at your bed and you will find him there. *** I saw a flying woman with an iron beak, a wooden body, and a feathered tail, carrying death. ---She is a companion of soldiers. [What is a soldier? ---A wall of power, the dread of an enemy, a glorious service.] What is that which is, and is not? ---Nothing. How can a thing be, yet not exist? ---In name and not in fact. What is a silent messenger? ---That which I hold in my hand. What is that? ---My letter.l8 The dialogue begins with plain questions and simple metaphoric answers. When the talk turns to cosmology, the metaphors spin out--answers imitating riddles. What is the eye of night, the giver of dew, the prophetess of weather? The moon. When Alcuin asks, "What is a wonder?" (in theOld English Riddles the creature is often a "wonder" or "marvel"), Pippin responds with a true riddle. From that point on the exchange is entirely in riddles-- ranging from the slightly bawdy bedroom wonder (probably a pillow) to the philosophical paradox of the apparently real nothing. The dialogue thus becomes a seed-frame for riddles.