Silence in the Exeter Book Riddles

Abstract

Many Old English riddles of the Exeter Book delight in sonic play, but a small number luxuriate instead in provocative silences. This article brings together contemporary and medieval sound theory to examine silence in the riddles, arguing that attitudes to silence were ambivalent rather than negative. At times, the silence of the suffering being is potentially an act of resistance to the craft of the riddles, as well as an invitation to listen for other voices silenced by Anglo-Saxon culture. The final section of the article reveals that the destructive consumption of the bookworm of Riddle 47 is not merely the act of a bad monastic reader, but instead produces “signal noise,” which generates new content, new art, and new ways of reading Anglo-Saxon literature in which the loss of the past is celebrated, rather than lamented.