River). In some dozen and a half others there are fainter connections with the Latin riddles, different editors holding different views. But the point is that these two hundred Latin enigmas must have suggested the composition of vernacular riddles, most of them probably by clerics, in that transitional middle-world between pagan and Christian, when those men who were sufficiently trained to write English verse could look both ways and feel no hesitation in mingling the sacred and profane. The same is true of the man who compiled the Exeter book.
MANUSCRIPT
Leofric, bishop of Exeter (d. 1072), gave to his cathedral library “one large book in English verse on various subjects.” This, the Exeter Book, is a manuscript of 130 folios written in one hand, probably late in the tenth century. These various subjects are mostly religious, that is, either Christian or of markedly Christian coloring. Among them are three poems—Wanderer, Seafarer, Riming Poem—which are pagan elegies lamenting the degenerate times, but with homiletic passages which are perhaps interpolations; and also half a dozen pieces, running to more than 350 lines all together, which are clearly Germanic pagan in origin. These are (to give them their modern titles) Widsith, Deor, Wulf and Eadwacer (called sometimes the Quondam First Riddle because the earliest editors mistook it for a riddle), The Wife’s Lament, The Lover’s Message, and The Ruin.
The Riddles came toward the end of the manuscript in three places: beginning on fol. 101a, the first fifty-nine riddles; these are followed by The Wife’s Lament and seven other pieces; then a second text of k-d 30 and k-d 60; then after The Lover’s Message and The Ruin, the remaining riddles, k-d 61–95. The last several folios of the manuscript were at some time damaged, probably by fire, leaving the text badly mutilated. It would seem therefore that the scribe had before him first a group of fifty-nine riddles. Later he came upon, or was given, another text of 30, which he copied without recognizing or regardless of repetition, and then followed it by 60, if that is really a riddle (see pp. 33 f. below). Next he added two poems which
