The Old English and Anglo-Latin Riddle Tradition

"Riddles, wordplay, and enigmatic utterance have been at the heart of English literature for many centuries: if the crossword as a form is only a hundred years old, the principles that underlie its successful solution go back more than a millennium, when anagrams, acrostics, and a variety of word and sound games both within and beyond Old English and Latin, the two literary languages of Anglo-Saxon England, are attested both widely and well. The Anglo-Saxon riddle tradition is rich and reaches back: the demonstrable connection between the Old English material and a literate and learned Latinate tradition only emphasizes the importance of investigating such a link in closer focus. But it also reaches across, connecting what might otherwise seem somewhat trivial texts to a broader tradition that transcends national, temporal, cultural, and linguistic boundaries. Anglo-Saxons evidently wanted to understand the world, to explain it, and perhaps above all, to marvel at its myriad ways. The Anglo-Saxon riddle tradition poses many questions, and seems to be comfortable with the fact that for each and all of those questions there is not necessarily a single or simple and unanswerable solution. Sometimes just asking is apparently enough, and in picking a path through the question at hand the respondent seems encouraged to wander. In the spirit of the multilingual Anglo-Saxon riddle tradition, this book aims not only to ask more questions than it can possibly answer, but also to keep an eye on the benefits of wandering in wonder, as well as the grave dangers of error"--