which has dominated English verse for so long, which our ear has lately learned to do without and which the Anglo-Saxon ear never knew.
Although there are several translations of selected riddles,[1] there has hitherto been no English translation of all the Exeter Book riddles except that of Professor W. S. Mackie in the E.E.T.S. edition (London, 1934), a line-by-line rendering aimed primarily at accuracy and clearness.
A close look at two specimens will best illustrate the problems and the present method.
First, riddle 26 (k-d 38), Bull Calf, is comparatively simple. It consists of seven lines which correspond roughly to the six hexameters of Aldhelm’s De Bovo, sive Juvenco: “Slaking the dryness of my mouth with foaming throat I thirstily drew in my drink from twice two throats. While living I break up the fertile clods of soil along with the stubble by the effort of my stout strength; but when the breath leaves my chill frame, I can bind men fast in terrible bonds” (Wyatt’s translation). The Anglo-Saxon expands the first two hexameters into four lines and compresses the remaining four hexameters into three epigrammatic lines. It is bare where the Latin is flowery, but it has its own kind of indirection at the beginning. It runs: “I saw the creature [wiht is a feminine noun and thus misleading about the gender of the solution; so it adds at once] of the weaponed-kind [i.e., a male creature, one which fights with weapons, to be later recognized as the animal’s horns], eager for the joys of youth [suggesting the sexual urge, but this is at once corrected]. It lets for its use [literally, for tribute] four life-giving fountains brightly shoot, gush forth, to its delight [on gesceap is uncertain; it may mean ‘as fate wills’]. [With a different punctuation the sense would be: ‘the life-sustainer (mother, cow) lets four fountains….’] A man spake [maðelode, a word from the epic style] who said to me: ‘This creature if it survives will break up downs; if it is rent asunder will
- ↑ By Albert S. Cook and C. B. Tinker, 1902, 1926; Cosette Faust and Stith Thompson, 1918; J. Duncan Spaeth, 1920; Robert K. Gordon, 1926; Charles W. Kennedy, 1943. Also by Stopford Brooke in his History of Early English Literature to the Accession of King Alfred, 1892, and in English Literature from the Beginning to the Norman Conquest, 1898.
