purposely fashioned it, that I with thee
should boldly declare, for us two alone,
a spoken message, so that no other men
should further grasp the words of our speech.
Reed-pen or Reed-staff (Runenstab, a piece of wood on which the runes were incised); more specifically, according to B. Colgrave and B. M. Griffiths (MLR iii [1936], 545–47), kelp-weed (Laminaria digitata), an alga with a thick stem, easily incised, which, after being dried, can be re-wet to make the markings visible. Two facts, however, have given rise to an uncertainty; for references, see notes in Krapp–Dobbie. First, it is unusual for a riddle to carry a secret message “for us two alone”; and second, this riddle is followed immediately in the manuscript by a poem of fifty-five lines called The Lover’s Message, which begins: “Now I will speak to you apart,” and goes on to tell how he was driven into exile and now is waiting for her to join him in the spring, when they can renew their vows of love. The poem ends with five runes testifying to his faithfulness; or they may contain the lover’s name as a signature. Just after this comes in the manuscript a new poem, The Ruin, and then the final group of riddles (K-D61–95). Thus it looks as though the compiler from whose copy the Exeter scribe worked had rightly or wrongly taken 60 to be an introduction to The Lover’s Message and perhaps made some adjustments in bringing the two pieces together, chiefly by omitting the conclusion. If rightly, however, this is not a riddle at all.
42 (K-D 47)
A moth ate words. To me it seemed
a remarkable fate, when I learned of the marvel,
that the worm had swallowed the speech of a man,
a thief in the night, a renowned saying
and its place itself. Though he swallowed the word
the thieving stranger was no whit the wiser.
Book-moth. Developed from Symphosius 16, Tinea or Bookworm: “A letter was my food, yet I know not what the letter is. In books
