Avian Pedagogies: Wondering with Birds in the Exeter Book Riddles

Abstract

BIRDS IN THE EXETER BOOK RIDDLES are an important subject of wonder, the various and unique transformations of particular species described in a scheme of nearly one hundred riddles that marvel at nonhuman phenomena, both animate and inanimate. Anglo-Saxon riddles as a whole had serious, didactic purposes and, despite their unique characteristics, the Old English riddles’ clear connections to the Anglo-Latin examples make it likely that they also served some form of pedagogic role in a monastic environment. Certainly their formulaic injunctions, instructing that we frige ‘ask’ or saga ‘say’ hwaet ‘what’ or hu ‘how’ something is or comes to be, fit with the intellectual lines of inquiry evident in the Latin riddles. Superficially, then, birds feature on one level in the ‘catalogue of diversity’ to be pondered, guessed and classified by naming a solution. As scholars of the Exeter Riddles have long known, however, their unique form of vernacular riddling presents audiences with sophisticated, often divergent forms of learning and hermeneutics in their own right, and in this chapter I explore how birds’ peculiarities become part of the collection's self-reflexive pedagogic aims and strategies. As in Chapter One, we are never far from the mysterious qualities of birds’ foreignness, and this compelling avian aspect will ultimately concern us more with how the Riddles’ strategies reveal ignorance as much as enlightenment. I see avian quiddities as particularly apt in this dialogic game, because the lives and behaviours of these proximate strangers exemplify well the distinctive interplay of the known and unknown in riddling discourses; in being both nameable and anonymous they suit riddles’ tendencies to obfuscate and disambiguate concurrently. Birds are a significant element in the miscellany, that is, because they enact a series of diverse transformations that redouble their participation in the Riddles’ preoccupations with wondering. As subjects of wonder, they naturally perform a bewildering range of perpetual sleights and shifts that transgress species and territory boundaries, making their diversity excellent riddle material. Within riddling frameworks, however, this unpredictable diversity achieves a heightened focus because it meets with further transformations imposed by metaphor and paradox.