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The Old English Storm Riddles

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Erika von Erhardt-Siebold
Erika von Erhardt-Siebold*
Affiliation:
Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, N. Y.
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Extract

Three of the riddles in the Exeter Book, usually numbered 1, 2, and 3, are commonly known as the Storm Riddles because of their unusually vigorous and beautiful descriptions of disasters on sea and on land as caused by the uproar of the elements. We owe to Professor Charles W. Kennedy the complete interpretation of riddles 2 and 3. Kennedy, I think, has established two things conclusively: first, that riddles 2 and 3 are actually but one riddle—I shall subsequently refer to it by riddle 2–3—secondly, that the background of the storm riddles is Graeco-Roman cosmological thought. Riddle 2–3 dwells successively on four aspects of the turbulent atmosphere, the submarine storm (R.2, lines 1–12), the earthquake (R.3, lines 1-16), the storm at sea (R.3, lines 17–35), and the thunderstorm on land (R.3, lines 36-66). Lines 67–72 summarize the four themes.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 64 , Issue 4 , September 1949 , pp. 884 - 888
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1949

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References

1 The Earliest English Poetry (Oxford Univ. Press, 1943), pp. 140–146 and 364–368.

2 All line references are to Krapp and Dobbie, edd., The Exeter Book (Columbia Univ. Press, 1936).

3 Mediœval Studies, viii (1946), 316–318.

4 W. S. Mackie, The Exeter Book (Oxford Univ. Press, 1934), p. 89.

6 This explanation is well known from several Latin authors; it is found also in an Ag.S. Carmen Rhythmicum composed in Aldhelm's time and published by R. Ehwald in MGB, A.A., xv (1919), 524 sq., vs. 93–114.

6 Cf. Krapp-Dobbie, p. 321, and F. Tupper, The Riddles of the Exeter Book (New York, 1910), p. 70.

7 See F. M. Cornford, Plato's Cosmology (London-New York, 1937), pp. 224–239.

8 See Isidore, Nat. Rer., xiii.

9 M. Trautmann, Die Altenglischen Raetsel (Heidelberg, 1915), p. 66 ad 11–14, and Krapp-Dobbie, p. 322 ad 1, 14.

10 Kennedy, p. 140.

11 That wind cannot be caught in one's hand, i.e., be made to stand still, is a favorite motif with many mediaeval writers. E.g., Aldhelm's riddle 2, Ventus. Cf. Prov. xxx. 4 and Ecclesiasticus xxxiv. 2. A. J. Wyatt, Old English Riddles (London, 1912), p. 66 ad R.3, 17–36, already noticed certain inconsistencies and tried to overcome them by proposing a solution for theme 3 in R.3 different from that for the other themes.

12 Plato, Phaedrus, 111 C-112 D. In the 15th century Leonardo da Vinci still adhered to Plato's idea of the earth being a huge animal with heart, veins, and lungs. In Aldhelm's riddle 6, Luna, the tides are thought to well forth from a deep gorge in the ocean and to recede again into it.

13 Kennedy and others have already drawn attention to pertinent passages in Latin authors, such as Lucretius, Pliny, Isidore, Bede, that may have served as sources for the several themes in our riddles.

14 See the table of solutions in Mackie, pp. 240–242. This table, in part already obsolete, will eventually have to be revised.

15 Kennedy, p. 145. Tupper, pp. lxiii-lxxix, champions the essential unity of authorship. To my knowledge, the doublets have never been studied from the angle of whether they suggest one or more authors.

16 Taliesin's long Welsh rhapsody “Wind” is quite different in character from riddle (2,3).

17 PMLA, lxi (Dec., 1946), 910-915, and Medium Aemm, xv (1946), 48–54.

18 Kennedy, p. 145.