January Challenge: An Exeter Book Riddle

To start the year, I wanted something that wasn't terribly difficult. I quickly hit upon one of the "off-color" riddles from the Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book. Several are a good length - long enough to make a performance, not too long that they would be very hard to memorize.

Picking a Riddle

I knew that I wanted one of the "innuendo" riddles. Bawdy material is always popular in the SCA, and I'd known of at least one bawdy period riddle since high school. Plus, I have been most intensely researching Anglo-Saxon England, its dress and ornamentation, and its scops and their performance. Putting together a credible performance would be easiest with something from that era.

My source is Kevin Crossley-Holland's translation, published by Penguin Classics. I read through the riddle collection, paying attention to the salty ones. In the end, I picked his Riddle 25 (listed as Riddle 23 on this university website), which was the very same one I encountered in high school. It's a very visual poem and seemed to lend itself well to performance, and the "clean" solution is a common enough item. (The one where the solution is "a butter churn" isn't so obvious to the modern mind.)

I have a concern that, even though the answer of "onion" is common enough, the riddle may be too hard. Few modern people encounter onions "growing tall, erect in a bed," and onions aren't especially medieval. I wonder if a different riddle would have been more "Middle Age-y." Performance will be the proof.

Elements of Performance

Having read a fair amount on hypothetical Anglo-Saxon oral performance, I had options for setting this piece. Recitation, chant, and song are all possibilities, either unaccompanied or accompanied by either a lyre or harp (I own both instruments). We have few enough descriptions of scops at work, and they are typically declaiming big, epic important stuff when we do hear about them - not telling dirty riddles.

It could be argued that there isn't even proof that these riddles were meant for performance at all. The first Anglo-Saxon riddle collection was done in Latin by Aldhelm, a churchman, and were based on the Roman riddle tradition. Did scops ever perform such things, or were they brain-games for the educated?

This is a problem that will appear whenever we look to re-create a performance coming out of an oral tradition based on the evidence of a literary one. But the literary evidence is all that we have to work with, so we will work with it.

I decided to go with a simple, unaccompanied recitation for several reasons:

• I was trying to keep my first effort simple
• Anglo-Saxon verse is irregular in meter, so writing music for it is difficult
• But mostly, I felt that the piece would be enhanced by body language, movement and gestures, which could not do seated with an instrument in my hands.

Aside: Art of the Bawdy Song

The SCA features many bawdy songs in its amusements. Thankfully, we don't seem as enthralled with outright dirty songs - those with a lot of obscenity, profanity, or vulgarity. We prefer a slightly more subtle "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" approach.

Songs with bawdy content are often structured to heighten the humor. Rhyme schemes suggest future words (and indeed, there's a song that uses that to play with your expectations effectively) and waiting to see if those predictions come true adds a humorous tension. Stanzas similarly mark off a rhythm. As each one concludes, the audience can feel the song getting closer and closer to the comedic payoff. The tune itself may help call out puns, euphemisms or allusions within the text.

My arhythmic alliterative poem isn't rhymed, isn't stanzaic, and doesn't contain any puns or similar wordplay. Very arguably, the entire poem is itself a piece of wordplay. All of the listed attributes can apply to either an onion or to a penis. They are framed to put the listener in mind of the latter, rather than the former. That's where the bawdy humor comes from.

But there's no easy musical setting for this poem to call that out. To re-write it as a rhymed, stanzaic song with a chorus would be to ignore the Anglo-Saxon poetic tradition entirely.

Rather than tackle the problem of creating "appropriate music" that was suitable for a difficult-to-set arhythmic poem and called out the humor in it, I decided to go for a recitation. I could have done an intrumental accompaniment to spoken poetry - I have in the past - but thought that physical motions would lend more to the suggestive comedy of it than some strummed chords.

Addressing the Crowd

With no music at all, presentation becomes paramount. I often deliver songs making good use of body language, facial expression and gesture, so this isn't entirely foreign to me. On the other hand, music also lends automatic timing (as in, "comic timing") which I had to work through on my own.

The attitude of a cocky young man seems most appropriate here. "I am a strange creature, for I satisfy women - a service to the neighbors!" he boasts, a little misogynistically. "I grow very tall, erect in a bed" - at the very least, a visible straightening of the posture is called for. (I'm not entirely sure how well this works on me, a short, curvy female, but we work with what we have.) The young stud goes on to narrate his encounter with the "golden-haired girl" who "gripped my russet skin" and whose "eye moistens" when she thinks of him. The performance requires some swagger, the bold confidence of a young, popular warrior.

Audience Response

I had the piece ready for performance by January 31, as desired. I have not yet had a chance to perform the piece for an audience at an event.