Exeter_Book_Riddle_12
Exeter Book Riddle 12
Old English riddle
Exeter Book Riddle 12 (according to the numbering of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records)[1] is one of the Old English riddles found in the later tenth-century Exeter Book. Its solution is accepted to be 'ox/ox-hide' (though variations on this theme, focusing on leather objects, have been proposed). The riddle has been described as 'rather a cause celebre in the realm of Old English poetic scholarship, thanks to the combination of its apparently sensational, and salacious, subject matter with critical issues of class, sex, and gender'.[2] The riddle is also of interest because of its reference to an enslaved person, possibly ethnically British.
The real historical interest in that riddle is in the references to the "Welsh" (ie: British), their enslavement & their black hair.
Dark hair was considered a slave trait by the Anglo-Saxons.