the description of a primitive plow or weaver’s loom. And finally, he had better texts.
The founder of riddling in England was Aldhelm (ca. 640–709), abbot of Malmesbury and later bishop of Sherborne, one of the most distinguished pupils of the great school of Canterbury. Under Irish influence (the abbey of Malmesbury was founded by the Irish scholar Maildubh) he cultivated an elaborate Latin style, which tends to obscure his great learning. In his prose work Epistola ad Acircium (685) he included one hundred Ænigmata in hexameters, ranging in length from four to eighty-three lines, on a great variety of subjects meant to glorify God’s creation. They begin with Earth, Wind, Cloud, and other natural phenomena, and end fittingly with the longest Creatura, or Creation. They are unlike riddles in that they do not pose a problem and ask for an answer, but are each headed by self-explanatory titles. Aldhelm acknowledges as his model the one hundred Ænigmata of one Symphosius (of uncertain date) about which nothing is known beyond his work.[1] Aldhelm was followed in England by Tatwine, archbishop of Canterbury (d. 734), and Eusebius, generally identified with Hwætberht, abbot of Wearmouth and a friend of Bede. Between them Tatwine and Eusebius produced another one hundred Ænigmata. Aldhelm is known to have composed poems in the vernacular, admired by King Alfred; and there is a story reported by William of Malmesbury (who had it from a lost work of King Alfred’s) of how Aldhelm would stand at a bridge and by reciting like a minstrel hope to entice passersby into the church. Thus it would not be surprising if he had composed riddles in the vernacular, but none in the Exeter Book can be reasonably attributed to him—unless possibly the Storm riddles (see pp. 3–7 below). Riddles 11 (k-d 40) and 50 (k-d 35) are translations of Aldhelm.
The editors of the Exeter riddles have sedulously traced the parallels with these four Latin collections, but relatively few are close enough to show direct influence. Numbers 41 (k-d 60) and 42 (k-d 47) are from Symphosius and 62 (k-d 85) resembles one of his (Fish and
- ↑ Aldhelm also remembered the passage in II Chron. 25:18 which tells cryptically how a king of Israel sent to a king of Judah saying, “The thistle that was in Lebanon sent to the cedar that was in Lebanon, saying Give thy daughter to my son to wife; and there passed by a wild beast that was in Lebanon, and trod down the thistle.”
