Exeter Book Riddle 90 under a New Light: A School Drill in Hisperic Robes

Abstract

Being the only text written entirely in Latin extant in the Exeter Book, Riddle 90 has eluded a plausible explanation of its exceedingly obscure clues and no satisfactory solution has been proposed for it yet. In this paper, I argue this is so because this composition was probably not a riddle in origin. Instead, what has traditionally been referred to as Riddle 90 should rather be seen as a school drill that probably seeped into the Exeter Book in the last stages of its compilation process or—more probably—its exemplar. A paleographical study of this text will evince that this poem was copied into the Exeter Book exemplar rather mechanically by a scribe who could not make much of its contents. Furthermore, an analysis of the rhetorical characteristics of Riddle 90 shows that the poet probably had in mind the literary patterns set by the Hisperic style, as observed in Aldhelm’s Carmen rhythmicum and The Rhyming Poem. Finally, I demonstrate that the formal aspects of Riddle 90 suggest that—in spite of being a modest Latin drill—this text could have been included into the Exeter Book because its stylistic features were consonant with the poetic modes cultivated by authors belonging to “Æthelwold’s school,” of which Wulfstan of Winchester was the leading representative.