Exeter Book Riddle 24 (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. The riddle is one of a number to include runes as clues: they spell an anagram of the Old English word higoræ 'jay, magpie'.^[2] There has, therefore, been little debate about the solution.^[3]

As edited by Williamson and translated by Stanton, the riddle reads:^[4]

It is clear for metrical reasons that the runes were supposed to be sounded by their names, which are also words in their own right, so that in a sense the translation should also be something like:

The riddles alludes to the jay's proclivity for imitating other species, and it has been argued that the poem's soundplay also reflects this.^[5]

• Krapp, George Philip and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie (eds), The Exeter Book, The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), pp. 192–93, https://web.archive.org/web/20181206091232/http://ota.ox.ac.uk/desc/3009.
• Williamson, Craig (ed.), The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), p. 82.
• Muir, Bernard J. (ed.), The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry: An Edition of Exeter Dean and Chapter MS 3501, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2000).
• Foys, Martin et al. (eds.) Old English Poetry in Facsimile Project, (Madison, WI: Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture, 2019-). Online edition annotated and linked to digital facsimile, with a modern translation.