The Earliest English Poems by none

Author:none
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Poetry, European, English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh, Anthologies (Multiple Authors), Medieval
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published: 2006-07-27T05:27:45+00:00

Riddles

ARISTOTLE devotes a paragraph of his Rhetoric to the riddle, and it is a form found in most ancient literatures, though it has suffered the fate of ‘occasional verse’ in modern times. The trick, as is well known, is to describe a thing, or, more characteristically, make it speak, in such a way that it is difficult to guess what it is. Today the riddle has been relegated to the Christmas cracker; but the riddles of The Exeter Book are often genuinely enigmatic, and generally less fatuous than the present-day variety.

It will be remembered that in Genesis ‘the Lord God, having formed out of the ground all the beasts of the earth and all the fowls of the air brought them to Adam to see what he would call them: for whatsoever Adam called any living creature the same is its name’.1 This is literally true, for from this primordial Naming all modern nouns and hence the language we speak are descended. Language is the chief means of human communication, and it is the gift of language that distinguishes us from the beasts. The novelty of the riddle is that by making a beast speak or depriving it of its name we render it un-recognizable. The subject of the riddle, animal, vegetable, or mineral, usurps the human prerogative of speech, and, naturally enough, takes a non-human point of view. The effect of this is a dislocation of perspective: a good riddle puzzles and can even be mildly frightening, simply because we do not know what it is that is speaking. The feeling of bafflement grows when we are confronted by a riddle to which no solution has been found. The effect of being asked a riddle by someone who lived eleven hundred years ago is already disconcerting; but not to know the answer is frankly embarrassing. The riddle surprises by presenting the familiar through a non-anthropomorphic lens: the result is strange and beautiful, or delightful, or simply pathetic, but it almost always has the special, rather odd, intensity peculiar to the form.

People in Anglo-Saxon times, living uncomfortably close to the natural world, were well aware that though creation is inarticulate it is animate, and that every created thing, every wiht, had its own personality. Though the forces of earth, air, and water were not regularly propitiated or invoked, an awareness of the old methods of sympathetic identification seems to have lingered on, by habit and instinct, in the arts, and certainly in the art of poetry, as is clearly shown by the few charms that remain, corrupt though their texts may be.

The riddle is a sophisticated and harmless form of invocation by imitation: the essence of it is that the poet, by an act of imaginative identification to which Vernon Lee gave the name ‘empathy’, assumes the personality of some created thing – an animal, a plant, a natural force. Some element of impersonation is involved in any creative act, but by performing this particular ventriloquism the poet extends and

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