Exeter_Book_Riddle_47

Exeter Book Riddle 47

Exeter Book Riddle 47

Old English riddle


Exeter Book Riddle 47 (according to the numbering of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records) is one of the most famous of the Old English riddles found in the later tenth-century Exeter Book. Its solution is 'book-worm' or 'moth'.

Text

More information Original, Formal equivalence ...

Glossary

More information form in text, headword form ...

Interpretation

The extensive commentary on this riddle is concisely summarised by Cavell,[2] and more fully by Foys.[3]

Editions

  • Krapp, George Philip and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie (eds), The Exeter Book, The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), p. 236.
  • Williamson, Craig (ed.), The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977).
  • 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.


Recordings

  • Michael D. C. Drout, 'Riddle 47', performed from the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records edition (29 October 2007).

References

  1. George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie (eds), The Exeter Book, The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), p. 205, with vowel-length marks added.
  2. M. C. Cavell, 'Commentary for Riddle 47', https://theriddleages.bham.ac.uk/riddles/post/commentary-for-exeter-riddle-47/ (23 November 2015).
  3. Martin Foys, 'The Undoing of Exeter Book Riddle 47: "Bookmoth" ', in Transitional States: Cultural Change, Tradition and Memory in Medieval England (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2017), working paper at https://www.academia.edu/15399839.



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