Books in Battle: The Violent Poetics of Misdirection in Old English Riddle 53

Abstract

Abstract Riddle 53 is one of the only remaining Old English riddles that still lacks a satisfactory solution. Previous solutions have included ‘battering-ram’ and GEALGA (‘gallows’ or ‘cross’), but neither of these answers solves the whole text. This article offers the first solution to solve the riddle completely without ignoring contradictory evidence or difficult lines; my solution is BOC OND FEÐER (‘book and quill-pen’). In addition to a new solution, this article offers an alternative approach for decoding medieval enigmas, one that foregrounds the connections between texts that surface reading and surface deceptions can offer. In other words, I argue for the clustering of riddles based on similarities in what I call the ‘poetics of misdirection’—their slippery surface themes and the places to which they are obviously trying to lead the reader—as an organizing principle for reading across the corpus. This method traces specific histories of poetic deception and appropriately situates Riddle 53 in a sub-genre of classroom literatures (in both Latin and Old English) that use violence and martial language as a form of misdirection when describing objects found in the early English scriptorium. Further, by focusing on the physical (rather than intellectual) labour required in the material process of bookmaking, this article emphasizes an aspect of life with books in the early Middle Ages that modern readers have often glossed over.