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"Skep" (Beinenkorb, *beoleap)as a Culture-Specific Solutionto Exeter Book Riddle 17Marijane Osborn aa University of California, DavisPublished online: 07 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Marijane Osborn (2005) "Skep" (Beinenkorb, *beoleap) as aCulture-Specific Solution to Exeter Book Riddle 17, ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of ShortArticles, Notes and Reviews, 18:1, 8-18, DOI: 10.3200/ANQQ.18.1.8-18

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“Skep” (Beinenkorb, *beoleap) as a Culture-Specific Solution to Exeter Book Riddle 17

The solution to Exeter Book Riddle 17 (Muir’s numbering)1 was formerlysuch a mystery that editors despaired, both Williamson (Old English Rid-dles 176) and Muir (2: 618) labeling the riddle “uncertain” in their editions.The rune Beorc (B) above the text has suggested burg and ballista, but Ger-man and Dutch scholars have recently favored a solution involving bee-keeping. My essay endorses this solution, examines a crux, argues for aconnection with a riddle by Aldhelm, and concludes with an emphasis onthe importance of specificity for a modern reader of Anglo-Saxon texts.

Many of the Exeter Book riddles have so far failed to find clear solutions.Along with a few classical “arbitrary riddles”2 for which the answer is wellknown (like Riddle 85, “a one-eyed seller of garlic”) and a number of reli-gious riddles and translations from earlier Latin riddles, the majority of thesebrief poems depend on a knowledge of objects and creatures familiar to theAnglo-Saxons for their answer: ships, swans, the bull whose hide becomesleather, chickens, quill pens, a book-eating moth, and so forth. Even the fewsalacious riddles refer to items such as onions, helmets, dough, and butterchurns. A number of riddles are clear to a degree but leave the specificsolution in doubt: for example, is the musical instrument in Riddle 31 a bag-pipe, a “Sutton Hoo” type lyre, or a related stringed instrument (since it isdescribed as sellic “rare” in the hall, it is probably not the familiar lyre, nowconfirmed by several additional English finds3), and does Riddle 15 refer toa fox or a hedgehog?4 Yet even these alternatives, with the arguments that aremade for them, give us scraps of a culture.

Riddle 17 and Its Solution

Once understood, Riddle 17 fits right in with these riddles whose solutionsadd pieces to our picture of the everyday Anglo-Saxon world, with theadded virtue of describing an object specific to the culture. This is the rid-dle, first in Old English (Muir’s text), then in a close translation:

Ic eom mundbora minre heorde,eodor wirum fæst, innan gefylleddryhtgestreona. Dægtidum oftspæte sperebrogan; sped biþ þy marefylle minre. Freo þæt bihealdeð,hu me of hrife fleogað hyldepilas.Hwilum ic sweartum swelgan onginnebrunum beaduwæpnum, bitrum ordum,eglum attorsperum. Is min innað til,wombhord wlitig, wloncum deore;men gemunan þæt me þurh muþ fareð.

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I am guardian of my flock,a protector made fast with wires, filled withinwith noble treasures. By day I oftenspit spear-terror; luck is the greaterwith my fullness.5 The lord beholdshow out of my belly fly battle-darts.At times I begin to swallow blackshining battle-weapons, fierce points,horrible poison-spears. My insides are useful,a shining wombhoard, precious to the proud;men remember what goes through my mouth.

Craig Williamson, the scholar who has worked most on the riddles, offersin his 1982 book of translations, A Feast of Creatures: Anglo-Saxon RiddleSongs, the series of solutions that at that time he has seen proposed for Rid-dle 17 (his number 15): ballista, fortress (burg), forge, inkwell, weaponchest. Then he says that surely the right solution “remains to be found”(Feast 173). In 1981, however, the correct solution had, in fact, been foundand published as a brief note in the German journal Anglia, where it seemsto have gone mainly unnoticed by scholars outside of Germany and theNetherlands.6 In this article, titled “Ein Neuer Lösungsvorschlag für einaltenglisches rätsel (Krapp-Dobbie 17),” Peter Bierbaumer and Elke Wan-nagat describe the riddle object as a “Geflochtener Beinenkorb” or wovenbee-basket. Such a “bee-basket” was the sort of container primarily usedinstead of a bee box for keeping bees throughout the Middle Ages, and lateras well; Milton speaks of the bees’ “strawbuilt citadel” in Paradise Lost.7

The Dutch scholar Wim Tigges recently described the subject of this riddleas “bees protecting the contents of their hive” (“Snakes and Ladders” 100),but the subject is the bees’ home as protector, not the bees themselves asprotectors of it, and even to call it a “hive” is misleading, for that wordmakes most of us think of the sort of bee-built hive (technically a nest) thatserves as a home for a swarm out in nature, or of the modern Langstroth beebox.8 The solution to Riddle 17 in modern English is “bee-skep” (a termwith which Bierbaumer and Wannagat were probably unfamiliar), and it isthe personified skep that speaks, such prosopopoeia being typical ofmedieval riddles.

The skep or basketwork beehive is specifically associated with the cul-tures surrounding the North Sea. The earliest reference to beekeeping innorthwest Europe is a passage from the lost book of the great fifth centuryBC traveler Pytheas of Massalia (Marseilles), quoted by Geminus around70 BC: “From the plentiful honey of their bees, the inhabitants of Thuleprepare a drink known as mead” (Cameron 50). We do not know wherePytheas’s Thule was located (bees cannot survive as far north as Iceland),nor how these people housed their bees, nor even if they had tame bees, andof course “mead” is the translator’s word. If those mysterious “Thulians”used some form of skep to house their bees, the construction was surely

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primitive. According to Eva Crane, the authority on historical beekeeping,the earliest skep yet found was constructed sometime in the first two cen-turies of our era (1–200 AD) and discovered by archaeologists in “a peatbog near Wilhelmshaven on the North Sea coast of Lower Saxony.” It waswoven “on a whorl of thin branches (still attached to a length of a mainbranch) of a fir or spruce tree,” with the cut portion of the main branchserving as a handle (Crane 241). This elementary form of wicker skepwould probably be insulated with mud or cow dung and thus would beheavy. Hives were constructed of bark as well. The other sort of hive is thelighter straw skep, and of this implement Crane tells us, “It is generallyconsidered that the coiled-straw skep was introduced at some period afterabout 500 when [the Angles and Saxons] first settled in eastern England.Use of the skep spread westward during subsequent centuries, and itbecame the common traditional hive throughout Britain” (251–52).Although he does not use this word,9 the Anglo-Saxon Aldhelm (639–709),abbot of Malmsbury and later bishop of Sherborne, seems to be referringto skeps of some kind in his prose De Virginitate. He seems familiar onlywith the older style wicker and bark skeps when he says that bees are toldby their “magistrate” “antiquas inhabitare sedes et exigua fovere tuguriagracillimis contexta viminibus seu cavatis consuta corticibus” ‘to remain intheir ancient places and cherish [their] little huts woven from supple wil-lows or sewn together with concave pieces of bark’ (Aldhelm 107).10

The description in Riddle 17 suggests to me that the poet has in mind thelighter and later “common traditional hive” (Crane) of the Anglo-Saxons,a coiled-straw skep. The rune Beorc above the poem, provided by someoneother than the main scribe, suggests that the word naming the object mightbegin with the letter B, just as the shield and sun riddles (numbers 5 and 6)are labeled with the rune Sigel for S, and a few other runes hint at solutions.11

Once we recognize the creatures or “weapons” flying in and out as insects,a word associated with the B-rune is obvious. An additional Lagu rune (L)is written above the Beorc rune (see plate viii and commentary inWilliamson’s Old English Riddles and also 181–82), perhaps implying anative reader’s solution such as leap beona, an unattested but viable com-pound such as *beoleap, or a similar word or phrase using those initial Land B sounds (instead of the more general beohyf proposed by Tigges in“Signs and Solutions” 73). In any case, answering the riddle “in its owntongue,” as John D. Niles has recently proposed we should do, and, takingthe runes seriously, we need a solution including the word beo and desig-nating some form of the bees’ “little hut,” as Aldhelm describes it.12

The correct reading of line 2a offers the evidence that may convince thereader of a solution so specific as “skep.” Although they clearly have in mindsuch a bee-basket, Bierbaumer and Wannagat translate what they take as atwo-word adjectival clause, eodorwirum fæst, as “durch Zaundrähte (Schutz-drähte) fest” (“[made] fast with fencing- or enclosure-wires”; 380). This

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translation obscures the fact that the words refer to the construction of a skep.Reading the half-line with Williamson and Muir as eodor wirum fæst, threewords instead of two, releases the noun eodor to serve as an appositiverenaming the previous mundbora or guardian, while cleverly shifting themeaning. Eodor can refer either to a human protector or a building and as apun facilitating the movement from man to thing “would make splendidsense of some very difficult lines” (Williamson, Old English Riddles 83). Weare told that this eodor (now a building) is wirum fæst, made secure withwires, rather as other buildings are described in Old English as made fastwith “bonds.”13 Thus, eodor wirum fæst very clearly refers to the construc-tion of a container fastened with “wires.” If the skep is the type of straw hivefamiliar to us and, according to Eva Crane, the hive typically used in Anglo-Saxon beekeeping, the so-called wires in this case are probably “the longvegetative shoots of the blackberry (bramble, Rubus species)” that KarlShowler recommends for traditional skep-making.14 The skep basket is typi-cally made of sheaves of wheat gathered into strands then coiled, beginningwith a small coil at the top and widening in a bell-shape to the “mouth” at thebottom, each layer tied firmly in place with strands of some kind of fibrousmaterial. Thus skeps are made to this day, looking very much as they do inillustrations of medieval gardens. The skep drawn by Septimus Linnaeus(1768; see Figure 1) shows what is most likely meant by eodor wirum fæst.

Each coil is bound tightly (fast) to the next by looping the binding mate-rial, aided by a needle, first around the top coil of straw, then around thenext one, and doing this stitch successively, around and around.15 The“mouth” of the poem is probably the wide opening at the bottom ratherthan the door hole woven into modern skeps like this one.

As is usual in riddles, the riddler begins by misdirecting us withambiguous language—what Wilcox nicely calls “decoy possibilities”(403)—making us think first of a shepherd guarding his gentle flock andthen of a guardian of treasures, but we are very quickly led away fromthese positive images into a fiercer picture of spitting “spear-terror.” Thisintroduces the new decoy possibility of an instrument of war. Although by

FIGURE 1. A Swedish skep.

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the end we understand that the solution to Riddle 17 is a basketwork con-tainer for bees, more likely made of straw than wicker, the first images thatthe poet presents also endure, a leader protecting his “flock,” then somesort of weapon (operating by day), and especially when that spitting spear-terror is further described as “battle-darts, black16 shining battle-weapons,fierce points, horrible poison-spears” (lines 6–9). Obviously at this pointthe riddler is playing on our expectation of a solution such as ballista, eventhough these terrors are actually bees, and Jonathan Wilcox, while arguingfor yet another solution (quiver), asserts that such alternative answers “areby no means wrong, merely partial” (403). This fierce aspect of the hive isillustrated in the earliest picture I could find that contained skeps, in anEnglish bestiary in twelfth-century Latin (British Library Add. MS.11283); Eva Crane reproduces it on page 331 of her book. This lively draw-ing shows a boy, either a thwarted beo þeof (a honey or bee thief) or a beoceorl (the beekeeper; both terms are recorded) who flees a swarm of angrybees flying out of their skep.

The bees are fierce because of what their hive contains, the dryhtgestreonaor wlitig wombhord so dear to the proud (lines 3 and 10); that is, of course,the honey.17 This combination of things to be valued and things to be fearedis a traditional motif concerning bees18 that continues throughout the rest ofthe poem. Near the end we are reminded that this riddle-object fierce withprojectiles has a treasure-filled “womb,” which, in my view, merely refers toits insides without implication of gender (the wombhord alliterates withwlitig and wlancum). The final line, “Men remember what goes through mymouth,” brings closure to the entwined themes of the stinging bees and theirtreasure of sweet honey, for each goes through the mouth of the skep (thewide opening at the bottom) and each in its own way is something to beremembered. This line also may allude to the often fierce honey of rhetoric.19

The Connection with Aldhelm

The paradoxical combination of the bees’ stinging and their honeyreminds one of Aldhelm’s riddle on the bee that is filled with a sweet bur-den (dulcia onero) while having arrow-points of warfare (spicula belli), thelatter possibly suggesting the hyldepilas to the Anglo-Saxon riddle poet.This is Aldhelm’s Riddle 20, in which the bee is the subject that speaks,followed by a translation:

Mirificis formata modis, sine semine cretaDulcia florigeris onero præcordia prædis;Arte mea crocea flavescunt fercula regum.Semper acuta gero crudelis spicula belliAtque carens manibus fabro vinco metalla.20

Formed in wondrous ways and engendered without seed,I load my sweet inwards with booty from flowers. Through my craft the food of kings grows golden with honey.

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I always brandish the sharpened arrow-points of fierce warfare,And yet, lacking hands, I surpass the metal-work of smiths.21

Aldhelm’s “Apis” riddle is different from Exeter Book Riddle 17 in tone aswell as in subject; the hive is not mentioned. In his opening words, mirificisformata modis, Aldhelm celebrates the divine mystery of the bee, whereasin eodor wirum fæst the Exeter Book riddler refers to the utilitarian craft ofskep-making, the construction of a protective little building by fasteningcoiled sheaves (less likely wickerwork, ling, or bark) with “wires.” Eventhough he is composing a riddle, the later poet appears more interested inthe human skill displayed in the object than in its mystery.

In his commentary on the riddles, Bernard J. Muir observes that “Anglo-Saxon riddles often develop a motif found in a Latin riddle, but seldomtranslate or rework a complete text” (2: 616, repeated 685). In my opinion,Exeter Book Riddle 17 is a fine example of such reworking of a motif,varying and expanding the themes of Aldhelm’s “bee” riddle to changefocus from the insect to its hive. In Aldhelm’s poem, the bee itself is a greatcraftsman superior to smiths because of the comb it builds, yet, with minorchanges, one could interpret this poem, especially lines 2–4, as being abouta hive. I think an Anglo-Saxon reader saw the potential for interpreting itso and was thus inspired to rewrite Aldhelm’s riddle as the description of askep, much as Aldhelm himself rewrote certain riddles of Symphosius. Thepossibility that the poet was familiar with Aldhelm’s riddle about bees issupported by the fact that Exeter Book Riddles 35 and 40 are actual trans-lations of Aldhelm’s Riddle 33 on the lorica (mail-coat) and his Riddle 100on Creatura (Creation), respectively. In fact, in their edition of Aldhelm:The Poetic Works, Lapidge and Rosier say of the compiler of the ExeterBook collection that “it would appear that [he] was attempting to emulateAldhelm’s collection by amassing nearly one hundred riddles” (67).

Like Aldhelm’s Latin “Apis” riddle, Riddle 17 is labeled, but in this caseonly with the rune or runes added by a later hand, and, unlike Aldhelm’sforthright title, the runes Beorc and Lagu preceding the Exeter Book riddlemerely provide a hint for the reader to puzzle over, as indeed scholars havedone ever since Franz Dietrich offered the solution ballista in 1859 (465).Aldhelm invites attention to a higher sense of mystery, proposing in hispreface to expose in speech “the secret riddles of created things” (qtd. inScott 129). The Anglo-Saxon riddles do express delight several times in thewondrous variety of the world; for example, in the sentence at the beginningof Riddle 31: “Is þes middangeard missenlicum / wisum gewlitegad,” ‘thisworld is made beautiful in various ways.’ But I would emphasize this worldin that sentence, for it is mainly on material culture and wild nature that thesevernacular riddles invite us to ponder.22 Peter Dale Scott remarks that evenafter answering the riddles of Aldhelm adequately, “we are still left withevocative shadows of significant congruity, which fascinate us long after we

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have put away the purely rhetorical figures of Symphosius. [. . .] We feel weare on the borders of a larger mystery, one not dispelled when we know theriddle’s answer” (133–34). Although Riddle 17 may owe its existence to Ald-helm’s previous bee riddle, instead of shadowing God’s otherworld mysterybehind Creation, this riddle, like many other Exeter Book riddles, offersthrough synecdoche an imaginative way into the more concrete reality of þesmiddangeard, as it is known to the riddler and his imagined audience.23 Theriddle’s very specificity is important because, behind and beyond the “littlehut of the bees,” the skep (or leap beoum), which is the riddle’s correct andculture-specific solution, extends the material reality of the Anglo-Saxonworld that we, as readers, enter.24

MARIJANE OSBORNUniversity of California, Davis

NOTES

1. When Bernard J. Muir edited the riddles in his edition of The Exeter Anthologyof Old English Poetry, he retained the numbering established in the previous edi-tion by Krapp and Dobbie. Craig Williamson’s numbering is slightly different in hisedition exclusively of the riddles; this one is his number 15. Muir’s numbering isfollowed in this article.

2. This is the term offered by Peter Dale Scott for riddles that require solutionsthat could not possibly be worked out by “native intelligence.” In his classificationof three types of riddles, the first type he describes is the arbitrary kind for which theperson to whom the riddle is directed cannot possibly guess the answer, such asSamson’s “out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweet-ness” (Frodo’s riddle for Gollum is another example); and the second is the typethat can be guessed by intelligence and ingenuity, like the riddle the Sphinx posesto Oedipus. (For the Scott’s third type, see my note 24.)

3. Elaine Musgrave examines the problem in some detail and finally prefers thesolution “cithara.” Graeme Lawson of the McDonald Institute for ArchaeologicalResearch at Cambridge University kindly offers this information about recent finds:“The ‘Anglo-Saxon’ lyre was evidently quite standard, right across the board (i.e., notjust the aristocratic ones) though unessential details vary. All are very elongated,comparatively narrow and shallow, dug-out; large hand-hole, wrist-strap, 6 strings,tiny bridge. They share these characteristics with all the finds from ContinentalGermanic territories, C5–8. Latest in date—so far—are C10–11, and a recent findis from C2. All evidently conform to the same core tradition, amazingly. All arevery much along the lines of Sutton Hoo 1970 with only minor structural differ-ences consistent with being made by different craftspeople.”

4. In “Some Points for the Porcupine,” Dieter Bitterli renews the argument for thisanimal at great length, in the end failing to convince me, at least, that hedgehog is abetter solution for Riddle 15 than fox.

5. “Sped biþ þe mare / fylle minre”: The Old English charm “For a Swarm of Bees”concludes with a similar idea, spoken to the swarm: “Beo ge swa gemindige minesgodes / swa bið manna gewhilc metes and eþles” (“Be thou as mindful of my good /as every man is of food and home”), in The Old English Minor Poems, ed. Dobbie;125. In a careful reading of this charm, James B. Spamer includes much informationabout Anglo-Saxon beekeeping that complements my argument in this essay.

6. Bierbaumer and Wannagat in 1981 (see below), Pinsker and Ziegler in 1985,

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Tigges in 1991 and 1994, and Bitterli in 2002. Wilcox mentions the Bierbaumer-Wannagat solution, only to dismiss it, in 1990.

7. 1: 773. Although the use of basketwork hives for beekeeping died out in Eng-land in the nineteenth century, the straw skep has been readopted as a relativelylightweight implement for catching swarms. See Karl Showler, “Some Hints on theArt and Mystery of Skep Making,” <http://www.beedata.com/data2/skeps.html>.Straw was not the only material used. According to the Yorkshire local historiansHartley and Ingilby, “Tom Rawson, the estate ling thatcher at Swinton nearMasham, made beehives of ling [heather], which had the disadvantage of beingsomewhat heavy” (55). They also point out that the “beeboles,” spaces let into gar-den walls where the “old-type straw or ling hives were housed, are to be seen hereand there” (55; see also Crane 253 and 315–17).

8. Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary defines beehive as “a box or other shelterfor a colony of domestic bees” (s.v.).

9. Even if he had been writing in English, Aldhelm would not have had accessin the late seventh or early eighth century to the word skep for a hive. According toC. T. Onions’s Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, s.v. skep, the OE wordsceppe (basket, or the quantity contained in a basket) entered the language late inthe Anglo-Saxon period, and its attested use to designate a hive does not occur untilthe fifteenth century. Onions offers a series of synonymous words in other Ger-manic languages, all referring to containers; only in English does the word come tosignify a specific form of beehive. 10. For this use of fovere, compare Aldhelm’s Aenigma 35 (Nycticorax); I appre-

ciate David Traill’s help in finding this reference and also his help with the trans-lation of Aldhelm’s “little huts” simile. In this simile, which is really advice to vir-gins, the bee-magistrate seems to be telling the swarm to stay put, to “cherish” theirhive and not go off to the wild or to some other beekeeper’s garden. (The purposeof the charm mentioned in note 5 above is similarly to keep the swarm at home.)Aldhelm refers so often to bees in his works that Eleanor Duckett says, “We feelsure his abbey possessed rude hives in its garden of herbs and that he must oftenhave watched their citizens going in and out on manifold daily errands” (62). Tothis Michael Lapidge responds austerely, “I am afraid I cannot agree [. . .] that Ald-helm’s use of the simile indicates that bees were kept at Malmesbury” (Lapidge andRosier 193). Aldhelm’s attention to the construction of these native skeps, however,seems too specific to dismiss his simile as a mere bookish allusion.11. Wilcox bases his dismissal of the B-rune as evidence on an observation that

the runic hints for solutions to other riddles, when provided by the main scribe, fol-low the text. For example, the runic initials of the solutions to Riddles 5 and 6, pro-vided by the main scribe, follow those riddles. But as Williamson points out, therunes preceding Riddle 17 were not provided by the main scribe (Old English Rid-dles 181–82), thus rendering Wilcox’s stated reason for rejecting them invalid. Thefact that the B and L runes are in another hand suggests that they were added bysomeone confident of having solved the riddle. Wilcox does observe in a footnote,“Another enigmatic letter, perhaps runic, has been added at the beginning of Riddle14 probably representing the initial of the solution of the following riddle” (405n12,citing Williamson, Old English Riddles 170–71). Williamson suggests that this is notthe H rune but the capital letter H itself (for Horn), perhaps “made by the same latereader who made the rune-like n at folio 103a above Rid. 6 to indicate the solution‘nightingale’” (171). Muir and others assume that the runes Beorc and possibly Lagurefer to the preceding Riddle 16, for which the solution is clearly anchor (withoutventuring to suggest a suitable word in OE), and several commentators do not readthe mark like an L-rune as a rune at all (see Muir 2: 586). Williamson comments

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on other marginal (that is, nontextual) runes in his Old English Riddles 147–48,155–56, and 167–68, observing that the Latin tradition gives titles (solutions)before the riddles (148).12. It would be good to know whether Aldhelm’s exigua tuguria was merely a

metaphor or his translation of a native term used for the type of hive common inhis day.13. I prefer the reading by Williamson and Muir of eodor and wirum as two separate

words to the reading by Krapp and Dobbie and others as a compound eodorwirum.They read it thus by analogy with similar compounds followed by fæst in Beowulf:the door of Heorot is fyrbendum fæst (Beowulf 722a), and the hall within is iren-bendum fæst (Beowulf 998). The reading eodorwirum fæst, however, makes thehuman guardian of the flock secured with “protecting wires,” instead of the eodorunderstood as a building. This is a confusing reading whether one thinks of the rid-dle’s solution as a weapon, an oven, a fort, or a beehive—or Wilcox’s quiver.(Wilcox wants to see the “wires” either as part of the quiver’s fabric or as a draw-string arrangement at the top; 397). The reading eodor wirum, with eodor a pun thatshifts the meaning of mundbora, greatly clarifies both the syntax at this point andthe sequence of ideas in the riddle as a whole. 14. Although other strong fibrous plants can be used, Showler strongly discourages

the use of manufactured bindings, giving several reasons (3).15. It is possible that the skep of Riddle 17 is the heavier wicker form of skep

woven from osier reeds and perhaps actually fastened with metal wires, althoughthat is unlikely. When the skep is imagined as a little house, an eodor, the “wires”used to bind human buildings would be an associated concept furthering the analogy:“If one assumes the Anglo-Saxon hive to have been constructed from wicker orstraw, wirum, which can only refer to metal, must be read as a metaphor” (Tigges,“Signs and Solutions” 75).16. Wilcox builds much of his argument against the solution “hive” by taking

sweartum to mean “by night,” even though such tmesis as sweartum swelganonginne / brunum beadowæpnum, dividing grammatically related words by otherparts of speech, is not rare in Old English, especially, it seems, when datives areinvolved. Compare, for example, the beginning of Wulf and Eadwacer: “Leodum isminum” (“To my people it is [. . .]”), and also line 12 of that poem: “wena me þine/seoce gedydon” (“your hopes made me ill”). I have translated brunum “shining.”Wilcox further argues that “OE brun suggests ‘variegated surface—reflectivity’ andis usually applied to metallic objects” (396), but as he notes himself, the word alsois used to describe feathers (406n21), and bees’ down can catch the light equally.In fact, in Riddle 27, the bees’ down is called “feathers.” (See my note 17.)17. Wilcox asserts that “the strongest case against ‘bee-hive’ is based on what the

riddle leaves out: the honey” (396). But this is a riddle, so naturally the honeywould be covered by a metaphor. As Aristotle says, “The very nature indeed of ariddle is this, to describe a fact in an impossible combination of words (which can-not be done with the real names for things, but can be with their metaphorical sub-stitutes)” (qtd. in Lapidge and Rosier 62). The honey is the treasure protected with-in the skep presented as an eodor or building, and later, when the hive is againpersonified as at first, held in its womb or belly. Compare Riddle 27, lines 3b–5a:“Dæges mec wægun / feþre on lifte, feredon mid liste / under hrofes hleo” (“By dayfeathers carry me aloft, transport me with skill under the protection of a roof”). Inthis other riddle, the potential honey itself is speaking (in its form as pollen) beforehumans make it into mead, and the “feathers” are synecdoche for the honeybees.Wilcox claims that a solution concerning honey or bees is prohibited by the lack ofany reference even to sweetness (396), but Riddle 27, for which the solution

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“mead” is unquestioned, does not mention sweetness either.18. Compare lines 19–22a of Homiletic Fragment I, qtd. by Bierbaumer and

Wannagat 382.19. One may think of the wisdom, sweet or harsh, that highborn women are specif-

ically assigned to speak to men in Maxims I (lines 91–92), or, for an extendedexample, of lines 37–55 of The Wanderer, in which that lonely man longs so muchto hear a protecting lord’s “larcwidum” ‘words of lore,’ loving and no doubt some-times scolding advice, that he imagines the squawking seabirds around him to becommunicating spirits—but his suffering grows even heavier as they speak to himno “cuðra cwidegiedda” (“well-known precepts”).20. Text from James Hall Pitman’s edition of The Riddles of Aldhelm 12. 21. This translation is closely based on that by Lapidge and Rosier (74). 22. Tigges says, “Going by the nature of the answer[s] to Aldhelm’s riddles in

combination with the consensus answers to many of the Exeter Book riddles, theodds appear to be very much in favour of an animal (less frequently a plant), anobject (usually a fairly common tool or implement), or a natural phenomenon.Abstractions are extremely rare (and then likely to be a reference to Creation of[sic] Nature), human beings even more so” (“Signs and Solutions” 66).23. Despite this emphasis on the material world, there is certainly scope in some of

the riddles for a meaning more like Aldhelm’s. In a fascinating paper, Irina A.Dumitrescu argues for a mystical meaning in Exeter Book riddle 85, its subject (“riverand fish”) traceable both to Aldhelm and Symphosius. She mentions other “guest inthe house” riddles (“creature in the house” riddles might be more accurate), both inOE and Latin, but includes neither Riddle 15 nor 17, perhaps because although theyshare the general theme, they do not seem to engage a mystical level of meaning.24. In his article on Symphosius and Aldhelm, Scott classifies three types of riddles,

two of them mentioned above. He describes the third type as not solvable “by ournative wits but by our acculturated memory” (134). By “acculturated memory” Scottis referring to the books on which Aldhelm draws, but identification of the ExeterBook riddle’s solution has required another sort of contextualizing “acculturatedmemory.” If I had not recently been wondering about Anglo-Saxon beekeeping whenI happened to look at Riddle 17, I would never have seen in my mind’s eye the imageof the old-fashioned skep—for it is a visual image that line 2a evokes. A day or twoafter my son, David Allen, a beekeeper in England, had asked me to find somethingin Old English about bees, I discovered this solution to Riddle 17 independently and,with that recognition, experienced a moment of great delight that comes with such adiscovery. I only later found out that Bierbaumer and Wannagat had recognized theriddle-object before me. This essay continues my ongoing project of aiding our imag-ining of concrete objects (“things”) mentioned in Anglo-Saxon poems.

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Bitterli, Dieter. “Exeter Book Riddle 15: Some Points for the Porcupine.” Anglia120 (2002): 461–87.

Cameron, Ian. Lodestone and Evening Star: The Epic Voyages of Discovery, 1493B.C.–1896 A.D. New York: Dutton, 1966.

Crane, Eva. The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting. London:Duckworth, 1999.

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Dietrich, Franz E. “Die Räthsel des Exeterbuchs. Würdigung, Lösung und Herstel-lung.” ZjdA 11 (1859): 448–90.

Dobbie, Elliott van Kirk, ed. The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems. New York: ColumbiaUP, 1942. Vol. 6 of The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records.

Duckett, Eleanor Shipley. Anglo-Saxon Saints and Scholars. 1947. Hamden, CT:Archon, 1967.

Dumitrescu, Irena A. “The Fish in the Enigma and the Enigma in the Fish.” Beyondthe Horizons: Medieval Epistemologies of Communication Conf. U of California,Berkeley. 6–7 Mar. 2004.

Hartley, Marie, and Joan Ingilby. Vanishing Folkways: Life and Tradition in theYorkshire Dales. Cranbury, NJ: Barnes, 1971.

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Lapidge, Michael, and James L. Rosier. Aldhelm: The Poetic Works. Cambridge:Brewer, 1985.

Lawson, Graeme. Electronic mail message to the author. 14 May 2004.Muir, Bernard J., ed. The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry. 2 vols. Exeter:

U of Exeter P, 1994.Musgrave, Elaine. “Cithara as the Solution to Riddle 31 of the Exeter Book.” Pacific

Coast Philology 37 (2002): 69–84.Niles, John D. “Answering the Exeter Book Riddles in Their Own Tongue.” Lecture

at the University of California, Berkeley. 12 March 2004. Onions, C. T. The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Oxford: Clarendon, 1966.Pitman, James Hall. The Riddles of Aldhelm: Text and Verse Translation. 1925. Yale

Studies in English 67. Hamden, CT: Archon, 1970.Scott, Peter Dale. “Rhetorical and Symbolic Ambiguity: The Riddles of Sympho-

sius and Aldhelm.” Saints, Scholars, and Heroes: Studies in Medieval Culture inHonor of Charles W. Jones. Ed. Margot H. King and Wesley M. Stevens. Vol. 1.Collegeville, MN: Hill Monastic Manuscript Lib., 1979. 117–44. 2 vols.

Showler, Karl. “Some Hints on the Art and Mystery of Skep Making.” <http://www.beedata.com/data2/skeps.html>.

Spamer, James B. “The Old English Bee Charm: An Explication.” Journal of Indo-European Studies 6 (1978): 279–94.

Tigges, Wim. “Signs and Solutions: A Semiotic Approach to the Exeter Book Rid-dles.” This Noble Craft: Proceedings of the Tenth Research Symposium of theDutch and Belgian University Teachers of Old and Middle English and HistoricalLinguistics. Ed. Erik Kooper. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991. 59–82.

———. “Snakes and Ladders: Ambiguity and Coherence in the Exeter Book Rid-dles and Maxims.” A Companion to Old English Poetry. Ed. Henk Aertsen andRolf H. Bremmer, Jr. Amsterdam: VU UP, 1994. 95–118.

Wilcox, Jonathan. “New Solutions to Old English Riddles: Riddles 17 and 53.”Philological Quarterly 69 (1990): 393–408.

Williamson, Craig, ed. and trans. A Feast of Creatures: Anglo-Saxon Riddle Songs.Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1982.

———, ed. The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book. Chapel Hill: U of NorthCarolina P, 1977.

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