Exeter Book Riddle 30 (according to the numbering of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records) is one of the Old English riddles found in the later tenth-century Exeter Book. Since the suggestion of F. A. Blackburn in 1901, its solution has been agreed to be the Old English word bēam, understood both in its primary sense 'tree' but also in its secondary sense 'cross'.^[1]

The riddle is particularly important because it actually appears twice in the Exeter Book, on folios 108r (numbered 30a in the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records) and 122v (numbered 30b). Parts of 30b are missing due to burn damage to the manuscript. This makes Riddle 30 a rare example of an Old English poem surviving in two copies (in this case both by the same scribe). The copies are fairly different, and these differences seem more likely to have arisen from scribal rather than memorial transmission.^[2][3] In the assessment of Roy M. Liuzza, '30b is rhetorically a decidedly more forceful poem than 30a'.^[2]

Text

As transcribed by Roy M. Liuzza^[2] and translated by Pirkko Koppinen,^[4] Riddle 30's text is thus:

Editions

• Foys, Martin et al. Old English Poetry in Facsimile Project (Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2019-).
• Krapp, George Philip and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie (eds), The Exeter Book, The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), pp. 195-96, 224-25, http://ota.ox.ac.uk/text/3009.html.
• Williamson, Craig (ed.), The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), no. 28.
• Muir, Bernard J. (ed.), The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry: An Edition of Exeter Dean and Chapter MS 3501, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2000).

References