Exeter Book contain descriptions of Guthlac’s battles
with heathens and struggles against attacks by demons.
Several Anglo-Saxon religious poems, with titles
such as Genesis A & B, Exodus, and Daniel, consist of
paraphrases of books of the Bible, while others, like
“Cædmon’s Hymn” and the well-known The DREAM OF
THE ROOD, appear to be entirely original compositions.
A large number of Anglo-Saxon poems are neither
heroic nor religious in content, however. ANGLO-SAXON
RIDDLEs, CHARMs, maxims, and occasional poems tend to
be much briefer than the works discussed above but do
demonstrate the wide variety of Anglo-Saxon poetry.
See also HAGIOGRAPHY.
FURTHER READING
Godden, Malcolm, and Michael Lapidge, eds. The Cambridge
Companion to Old English Literature. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1991.
Greenfi eld, Stanley, and Daniel Calder. A New Critical His-
tory of Old English Literature. New York: New York Uni-
versity Press, 1986.
William H. Smith
ANGLO-SAXON RIDDLES (WISDOM
POETRY, GNOMIC VERSE) A riddle asks a
question or describes a concept and challenges the lis-
tener to identify it; the terms used seem obscure until
the answer is known. Anglo-Saxon riddles ask ques-
tions about familiar objects or animals in terms that
often suggest paradox. In Anglo-Saxon England, the
tradition of riddling begins with several eighth-century
Latin collections written in imitation of earlier Conti-
nental models. Old English riddles appear as elements
in poetic and prose texts such as Apollonius of Tyre and
the Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn, as well as in other
freestanding forms.
The majority of Old English riddles are poems of
around 10 or 15 lines and are preserved in the EXETER
BOOK, which contains three different groups of riddles,
90 in total, though scholars think the collection may
have originally consisted of 100 riddles.
Latin collections typically provide solutions for the
riddles they contain, but the Exeter Book collection
does not, so readers are left to attempt to discern the
answers. The Exeter Book riddles typically describe a
common thing or an animal in the context of human
life. Several riddles describe an ox or its leather in vari-
ous terms; in one of these (#10), the living creature
plunders the land while its dead form serves men. The
ox plows fi elds; its skin can be used for a wineskin, a
fl oor covering, or cord, among other things.
In Riddle 45, the riddler obscures the bookworm’s
origins by saying the moth eats words (rather than the
books in which they are written). The text is full of
double meanings: WYRD, typically translated as “fate,”
may pun on “speech” or “sentence,” while cwide may
mean “that which is chewed” as well as “speech.” Like
other Old English poetry, riddles in verse contain
ALLITERATION and repetition, or the use of several words
referring to the same idea.
Several Old English riddles have double meanings
that allow for a sexual subtext hidden behind an inno-
cent solution. One, solved innocently as “onion,”
describes a thing very useful to women, standing upright
in a bed and shaggy with hair below, that a peasant’s
daughter grips fi rmly so that her eye becomes wet.
See also ANGLO-SAXON POETRY.
FURTHER READING
Wilcox, Jonathan. “ ‘Tell Me What I Am’: The Old English
Riddles.” In Readings in Medieval Texts: Interpreting Old
and Middle English Literature, edited by David Johnson
and Elaine Treharne, 46–59. Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 2005.
Williamson, Craig. The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book.
Chapel Hill, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1977.
Heide EstesANTITHESIS A common rhetorical device used
in love poetry and the SONNET tradition, antithesis
involves contrasting ideas and/or parallel arguments
within words, clauses, or sentences. This common
device is found throughout many SONNET SEQUENCEs,
fi nding particular favor within the works of SIR PHILIP
SIDNEY and WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. For example, in Son-
net 23 from SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS, the fi rst QUATRAIN
depends on antithesis to explain the narrator. Sustained
antithesis became known as Petrarchan paradox.APOSTROPHE From the Greek apostrephein,
“to turn away,” an apostrophe is a poetic device in
which an inanimate, absent, or imaginary person—orAPOSTROPHE 27