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Web End = Neophilologus (2016) 100:143160
DOI 10.1007/s11061-015-9450-8
Tristan Major1
Published online: 30 August 2015 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015
Abstract This paper reviews and assesses past scholarship on the so-called vasa mortis riddle of the Old English poem Solomon and Saturn II (lines 75103) before proposing its own solution. It examines the trajectory of the scholarly literature that initially attempts to identify the vasa mortis as an exact answer to a riddle, but more recently aims to free the riddle from any specic solution in order to interpret it more broadly. This papers own solution to the riddle is that the vasa mortis is to be understood as the thing that will destroy the Philistines at Doomsday. This solution is reached through analogies in the Old English passage and accounts of the traditional etymology of the Philistines, as well as biblical and patristic descriptions of eschatological demons.
Keywords Solomon and Saturn II Riddles Vasa mortis Eschatology Old
English Philistines Bible Josephus Demons
The so-called vasa mortis passage of Solomon and Saturn II is one of the obscurest passages in one of the obscurest poems in the Old English corpus.1 In this passage, Saturn, the poems pagan antagonist, asks Solomon, the poems wise and righteous protagonist, to talk about a certain mourning spirit (geomrende gast) that has been troubling Saturns curiosity (fyrwet) day and night for 50 years (6974).2 Solomon
1 The other famously obscure passage of the poem is Saturns rst riddle involving the weallende Wulf (lines 3446). See Menner (1938, 1941, 121126), Shippey (1976, 2324, 136137), Powell (2005, 130136), Scheil (2003, 3758), Anlezark (2009, 119121) and Major (2012).
2 All line numbers to Solomon and Saturn I (henceforth Sol I), Solomon and Saturn Pater Noster Prose (henceforth Sol PNPr), and Solomon and Saturn II (henceforth Sol II) refer to Anlezark (2009). Unless stated otherwise, all translations are my own, expect translations of the Bible, which are from the Douay-Rheims.
& Tristan Major [email protected]
1 Department of English Literature and Linguistics, College of Arts and Sciences, Qatar
University, PO Box 2713, Doha, Qatar
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