1. All translations of the Old English poetry are my own. The original texts for riddles may be found in my text edition, The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977); for nonriddlic poems, in The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records (hereafter ASPR), ed. George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, 6 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931-53. Occcasionally I have consulted other editions in making my translations from ASPR.

2. Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself," stanza 148, Leaves of Grass, ed. Harold W. Blodgett and Scullery Bradley (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1973, p. 86.

3. A description (translated from the Old English) of the Exeter Book which appears in a list of Leofric's donations to the cathedral at the beginning of the book.

4. William of Malmesbury, Gesta Ponticum Anglorum, ed N.E.S.A Hamilton (London: Longman, 1870 [Roll Series 52]), p. 336.

5. For more on the problems of authorship and date on the Exeter Book riddles, see the introduction to my text edition noted above.

6. The other manuscripts are the Vercelli Book, the Junius Manuscript, and the Beowulf Codex.

7. Benjamin Thorpe, ed., Codex Exoniensis: A Collection of Anglo-Saxon Poetry (Society of Antiquaries of London, 1842).

8. F. Dietrich, "Die Rathsel des Exeterbuchs," Zeitschrift fur deutches Altertum 11 (1859): 448-90; 12 (1865)" 232-52.

9. Frederick Tupper, Jr., ed., The Riddles of the Exeter Book (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1910).

10. Christian W. M. Grein, ed., Bibliothek der angelsachsischen Poesie, vol. 2 (Gottingen: G. H. Vigand, 1858); Bruno Assmann, ed., Bibliothek der angelsachsischen Poesie, vol. 2 (Gottingen: G. H. Vigand, 1898); W. S. Mackie, ed. and tr., The Exeter Book, pt. 2 (London: Early English Text Society, 1934); George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, eds., The Exeter Book (New York: Columbia Unicversity Press, 1936); A. J. Wyatt, ed., Old English Riddles (Boston: D.C. Heath, 1912); Moritz Trautmann, ed., Die altenglischen Ratsel: Die Ratsel des Exeterbuchs (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1915). For a fuller discussion of the various critical editions, see my text edition of 1977 noted above.

11. Mackie, The Exeter Book, pt. 2; Paull F. Baum, tr., Anglo-Saxon Riddles of the Exeter Book (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1963); Kevin Crossley-Holland, tr., The Exeter Riddle Book (London: Folio Socitey, 1978), reissued as The Exeter Book Riddles (New York: Prnguin, 1979).

12. Williamson, The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book

13. All translations of medieval Latin riddles are my own. The originals may be found in volumes 133 nd 133A of the Corpus Christianorum Series Latina (Turnhout: Brepols, 1968). The anchor riddle of Symphosius quoted here is from vol. 133A, p. 682.

14. Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, 133: 240.

15. For the characteristics of the Old English elegy, see B. J. Timmer, "The Elegiac Mood in Old English Poetry," English Studies 24 (1942): 34-36; R. F. Leslie, Three Old English Elegies," (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961); S. B. Greenfield, "The Old English Elegies," in Continuations and Beginnings, ed. E G. Stanley (London: Thomas Nelson, 1966), pp. 142-75; and Rosemary Woolf, "The Wanderer, The Seafarer, and the Genre of Planctus," in Anglo-Saxon Poetry: Essays in Appreciation, ed. L. E. Nicholson and D.W. Frese (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), pp. 192-207. Some of my observations on the elegiac horn riddle were first made in the formal response to a paper on the same subject by Edith Williams at a special session of the 1978 Modern Language Association meeting. The session devoted to Old English riddles was organized by Tim Lally.

16. W. P. Ker, The Dark Ages (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1904), p. 86.

17. Ibid., p. 87.

18. "Disputation regalis et noblissimi iuvenio Pippini cum Albino scholastico," lines 17-20, 28-32, 51-56, 86-87, 90-91, 101, 104-9. For the Latin text, see Walther Suchier, ed., Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, vol. 24, pt. 2, pp. 137-43. The translation quoted is by Sharon Turner (except for breacketed material, which is my own translation) and appears in The History of the Anglo-Saxons (London: Longman, 1852), 3: 380-82.

19. "Solomon and Saturn," ll. 230-42, 283-301; ASPR, 6: 39-41. In the initial exchange the book with seven tongues is probably the book with seven seals in Revelation. The blades are presumably sharp-edged pages.

20. ASPR, 6: lv.

21. Vafthruthnismal, stanzas 11-12, 36-37 (translation mine). For the original text, see Gustav Neckel, ed., Edda (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1927), pp. 45, 49-50. For a translation of the entire poem, see Henry Adams Bellows, tr., The Poetic Edda (New York: Oxford University Press, 1923), pp. 68-83.

22. The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise, ed. and tr. Christopher Tolkien (London: Thomas Nelson, 1960), stanzas 48, 60, 70; pp. 34, 39, 43.

23. See, for example, Kenneth S. Goldstein, "Riddling Traditions in Northeastern Scotland," Journal of American Folklore 76 (1962): 330-36.

24. Charles W. Kennedy, The Earliest English Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1943), p. 134.

25. The French surrealists actually played a riddlic game of disguises called by Breton "One in the Other." See Roger Callois's description of this in "Riddles and Images," tr. Jeffrey Mehlman, Yale French Studies 41 (1968): 148-58.

26. Baum, Anglo-Saxon Riddles of the Exeter Book.

27. Critical debate on each riddle is summarized in my text edition.

28. Robert Lehmann-Nitsche, "Zur Volkskunde Argentiniens, I: Ratsel," Zeitschrift des Vereins fur Volkskunde 24 (1914): 240-55.

29. Archer Taylor, English Riddles from Oral Tradition (Berkely and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1951).

30. My categories are based on those of Lehmann-Nitsche, Taylor, and also Charles Scott, who discusses ridle classification systems in "Some Approaches to the Study of the Riddle," in Studies in Language, Literature, and Culture of the Middle Ages and Later, ed. E. Bagby Atwood and Archibald Hill (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1969), pp. 111-27.

31. Archer Taylor, "The Varieties of Riddles," in Philologica: The Malone Anniversary Studies, ed. Thomas A. Kirby and Henry Bosley Woolf (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1949), p. 6.

32. For more on the folk traditions of not-quite-riddles, see Roger D. Abrahams and Alan Dundes, "Riddles," in Folklore and Foklife: An Introduction, ed. Richard M. Dorson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), pp. 129-43. The examples quoted are taken from this article.

33. Most editors and many critics have remarked on the different voices of the riddles. The terms "projective" and "nonprojective" are my own. I take the terms "hearsay" and "eyewitness" from Ann Harleman Stewart, "Old English Riddle 47 as Stylistic Parody," Papers on Language and Literature 11 (1975): 227-41.

34. For more on poetry as ontology, see John Crowe Ransom, The World's Body (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1938), and The New Criticism (New York: New Directions, 1941). On the "ontological function of metaphor," see Karsten Harries, "Metaphor and Transcendence," Critical Inquiry 5 (1978): 73-90.

35. Walt Whitman, Specimen Days, vol. 1 of Prose Works 1892, ed. Floyd Stovall (New York: New York University Press, 1963), p. 258. The quotation in full is: The most profound theme that can occupy the mind of man-- the problem on whose solution science, art, the bases and pursuits of nations, and everything else, including intelligent human happiness, (here to-day, 1882, New York, Texas, California, the same as all times, all lands,) subtly and finally resting, depends for competent outset and argument, is doubtless involved in the query: What is the fusing explanation and tie-- what the relation between the (radical, democratic) Me, the human identity of understanding, emotions, spirit &c., on the one side, of and with the (conservative) Not Me, the whole of the material objective universe and laws, with what is behind them in time and space, on the other side? The passage is cited in Giles Gunn, The Interpretation of Otherness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 175.

36. My discussion of metaphor is based on a number of sources-- primarily the Poetics of Aristotle, I. A. Richards's The Philosophy of Rhetoric (New York: Oxford University Press, 1936), much of Claude Levi-Strauss's work on metaphoric systems (see for example Totemism, tr. Rodney Needham [Boston: Beacon Press, 1963] and The Savage Mind [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966]), the recent work of Maranda and Stewart (see articles listed in Selected Bibliography), and my graduate work in anthropology in a course on "The Ethnography of Symmbolic Forms," taught by J. David Sapir (University of Pennsylvania, 1969).

37. Aristotle, Rhetoric 1405b; On Poetry and Style, tr. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1958), p.71.

38. Ibid., Poetics 1458a; On Poetry and Style, p.47.

39. Ibid. Rhetoric 1412a; On Poetry and Style, p.94.

40. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, especially chaps. 5 and 6.

41. My "metaphoric gap" correponds in some ways to the oppositional or contradictive elements of riddles identified by Robert A. Georges and Alan Dundes in "Toward a Structural Definition of the Riddle," Journal of American Folklore 76 (1963): 111-18.

42. The "collision" and "collusion" functions of poetic imagery were first mentioned by C. Day Lewis in The Poetic Image (London: Jonathan Cape, 1947), p.72; the functions are also discussed by Harries in "Metaphor and Transcendence" Critical Inquiry 5 (1978): 73. Two works on the theory of metaphor are most useful: the "Special Issue on Metaphor" of Critical Inquiry 5 (1978) and Paul Ricoeur's The Rule of Metaphor, tr. Robert Czerny et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977).

43. The light carried between the horns of the nearly new moon is actually earthlight, sunlight reflected from earth to moon, what the ballad, "Sir Patrick Spens" calls the "new moon late yestreen/ Wi' the auld moon in her arm." The Anglo-Saxons had no cosmological terms for the phenomenon-- indeed it appears to have been unrecognized apart from the central metaphor of this riddle. So as Harries says, "What metaphor names may transcend human understanding so that our language cannot capture it" ("Metaphor and Transcendence," p. 74). Metaphor has often paved the way to scientific discovery. W. V. Quine notes that "metaphor ... flourishes in playful prose and high poetical art, but it is vital also at the growing edges of science and philosophy" ("Afterthoughts on Metaphor," Critical Inquiry 5 [1978]: 161).

44. The relationship between riddle and kenning has oft been noted. See, for example: Ker, The Dark Ages, p. 87; Tupper, The Riddles of the Exeter Book, p. xiv; Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), pp. 134-35; Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 280; Agop Hacikyan, A Linguistic and Literay Analysis of Old English Riddles (Montreal: Cassalini, 1966), pp 34 ff,: Andrew Welsh, Roots of Lyric (Princeton: Princeton Univeristy Press, 1978), pp. 36 ff. The fullest discussion of the relationship is Ann Harleman Stewart, "Kenning and Riddle in Old English," Papers in Language and Literature 15 (1979): 115-36.

45. Aristotle, Poetics 1457b: On Poetry and Style, p.45.

46. "Maxims I" (Exeter Maxima), ASPR, 3:156-63; "Maxims II" (Cotton Maxims), ASPR, 6:55-57.

47. "Maxims II," ll. 17-29: ASPR, 6:56.

48. Charles T. Scott charts some of the reasons for this in "On Defining the Riddle: The Problem of a Structural Unit," Genre 2 (1969): 129 ff.

49. Aristotle, Rhetoric 1405b; On Poetry and Style, p.71.

50. Ibid., Rhetoric 1410b; On Poetry and Syle, p.89.

51. Welsh, Roots of Lyric, p.27.

52. Elli Kongas Maranda, "Theory and Practice of Riddle Analysis," Journal of American Folklore 84 (1971): 53.

53. Ian Hamnett, "Ambiguity, Classification and Change: The Function of Riddles," Man n.s. 2 (1967): 387.

54. For more on riddle and taboo, see Nigel F. Barley, "Structural Aspects of the Anglo-Saxon Riddle," Semiotica 10 (1974): 143-75.

55. According to Freud ("The 'Uncanny,' " in On Creativity and the Unconscious [New York: Harper and Row, 1958], pp. 122-61), our sense of the ghastly or uncanny derives from a childhood desire to project animate power into the surrounding world of inanimate objects. This "omnipotence of thought" leads to the obvious possibilities of nightmarish monsters and talking trees. Freud sees primitive cultures as locked into this childish state of mind-- but if this animation is deeply human, as Freud himself suggests, it may be that primitive myths and riddles are a cultural recognition of the process (as is psychoanalysis in the nonprimitive world). Riddles in particular may be a way of raising to consciousness this impulse to animate the world, and by playing with it in a lyric game, of rendering it delightful, acceptable (making the uncanny canny). Thus we recognize and reaffirm that part of the symbolic process which we first used to meet the world. By playing the childish game of riddles, we discover something of our own roots.

56. Frye, Anatomy, p.105.

57. For a discussion of the oral (rhythmic) and visual (patterned) dimensions of literature, see Northrop Frye, "The Archetypes of Literature," Kenyon Review 13 (1951), especially pp. 101 ff.; also his Anatomy of Criticism, pp. 77 ff. and 278 ff.

58. Frye, Anatomy, pp. 278-80; For more on the subject of riddles and charms as roots of lyric poetry, see Welsh, Roots of Lyric, chaps. 1, 2, and 6.

59. Frye, Anatomy, pp. 278-80, see also his chapter on "Charms and Riddles" in Spiritus Mundi (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1976), pp. 123-47.

60. For "poetry ... as the adopting of various strategies for the encompassing of situations," see Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, 3d ed. (Berkely and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), the title essay. For a larger discussion of motive, see A Grammar of Motives (Berkely and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969). Motive and metaphor are also treated in Permanence and Change, 2d ed. (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1965).

61. "The Nine Herbs Charm," ll. 68-69; ASPR, 6: 121.

62. "For Unfruitful Land," ll. 39-40; ASPR, 6: 117.

63. "Against a Wen," ASPR, 6: 128.

64. "Kenning" both in the sense of "knowing, understanding" ("to ken" = "to know") and in the sense of "a parphrastic naming." Both meanings are related to the Old Norse kenna, "to perceive, know, make known, name."

65. Aristotle, Rhetoric 1412a; On Poetry and Style, p.94.

66. Burke, Grammar, p. 503.

67. See the Whitman passage from Specimen Days quoted in n. 35.

68. For a summary of the social uses of riddling, see Thomas A. Burns, "Riddling: Occasion to Act," Journal of American Folklore 89 (1976): 139-65.

69. Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967), p. 105; for more on liminality, see also Turner's The Ritual Process (Chicago: Aldine, 1969).

70. This is a slight modification of the stages proposed by Arnold Van Gennep in Rites of Passage, tr. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabriella L. Caffee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960 [orig. Paris, 1909]). The pattern is best known to students of literature from Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949 [Bollingen Series]).

71. Frye, Spiritus Mundi, p.147.

72. See, for example Lévy-Bruhl's How Natives Think, tr. Lilian A. Clare (London: Allen and Unwen, 1926) and The "Soul" of the Primitive, tr. Lilian A. Clare (New York: Praeger, 1966). The relationship between the inner world of man and the outer world of nature has always been a prime concern of anthropologists. For Lévy-Bruhl the relationship is precausal and empathetic; for later anthropologists like Claude Lévi-Strauss, it involves the manipulation of natural symbols to fashion a social mirror. But even in Lévi-Strauss, there is a sense of natural myth as an act of empathetic poetry: the "savage mind" ("la pensée sauvage") is also "the wild pansy." This charting of the human abstract with concrete, natural symbols (what Lévi-Strauss calls the "science of the concrete") is of course a fundamental tenet of all imagistic poetry. It is what T.S. Eliot calls the "objective correlative." And the modern poet's view of "participation" is best put by Yeats in a letter to Dorothy Wellesley: "We are happy when for everything inside us there is a corresponding something outside us" (cited by Richard Wilbur, Responses [New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1976], p.103).

73. Léopold Sédar Senghor, Liberté I: Négritude et Humanism (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1964), p. 259.

74. Nigel F. Barley, "Structural Aspects of the Anglo-Saxon Riddle," Semiotica 10 (1974): 157.

75. Harries, "Metaphor and Transcendence," Critical Inquiry 5 (1978): 74.

76. "The Dream of the Rood," ll. 28-49, ASPR 2: 61-62.

77. Gary Snyder, Earth House Hold (New York: New Directions, 1969), p. 117.

78. Ibid., p. 123.

79. Ibid., p. 122.

80. Ibid., p. 119.

81. See especially Totemism and the Savage Mind.

82. Snyder, Earth House Hold, p. 121.

83. Senghor, Liberté I, pp. 259, 317; the translation first appeared in Senghor's Selected Poems / Poésies Choisies, tr. Craig Williamson (London: Rex Collings, 1976), p. 13.

84. Wilbur, Responses, p.219.

85. Ibid.

86. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, p. 135.

87. Snyder, Earth House Hold, p.120.

88. See n. 2.

89. D. H. Lawrence, "Morality and the Novel," in Phoenix I: The Posthumous Papers (New York: Viking, 1936), p. 528. The passage quoted was first published under the title "The Universe and Me," by the Powgen Press, New York, in 1935.

90. Snyder, Earth House Hold, p. 123.

91. Eido Shimano Roshi, "Meditation Workshop," for Professor Donald K. Swearer's course in "Myth, Symbol, and Ritual in Asian Religions," under the sponsorship of the Margaret Gest Center for the Cross-Cultural Study of Religion, at Haverford College, 11 February 1980. The story is recounted here as best I remember Eido Roshi's telling of it.

92. W. H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety (New York: Random house, 1947).

93. Richard Wilbur, The Poems of Richard Wilbur (New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1963), pp. 9-11.

94. For a description of sprung rhythm, see Harold Whitehall's "Sprung Rhythm," in Gerard Manley Hopkins, by Robert Lowell et al. (New York: New Directions, 1945), pp. 28-54.

95. For a description of Aelfric's style, see John C. Pope, ed., Homilies of Aelfric, vol. 1 (London: Early English Text Society, 1967), pp. 105-36.

96. Williamson, The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book, p. 97.

97. Fred C. Robinson, "Artful Ambiguities in the Old English 'Book-Moth' Riddle," in Anglo-Saxon Poetry: Essays in Appreciation: For John C. McGalliard, ed. Lewis E. Nicholson and Dolores Warwick Frese (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), pp. 355-62. Much of my discussion in this paragraph derives from Robinson.

98. For the various parodic devices in the riddle, see Ann Harleman Stewart, "Old English Riddle 47 as Stylistic Parody," Papers on Language and Literature 11 (1975): 227-41.

99. The puns were first recignized by Robinson.

100. Thomas A. Carnicelli, ed., King Alfred's Version of St. Augustine's Soliloquies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), p. 47 (translation mine).

101. Charles W. Kennedy, tr., An Anthology of Old English Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 41.

102. Burton Raffel, tr., Poems From the Old English, 2d ed. (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), p.93.

103. Baum, Anglo-Saxon Riddles, p. 34.

104. Crossley-Holland, The Exeter Riddle Book, p. 70.

105. Michael Alexander, tr., The Earliest English Poems, 2d ed. (New York: Penguin, 1977), p. 100.

106. Richard Hamer, tr., A Choice of Anglo-Saxon Verse (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), p. 107.