I’ve been chatting to Oxford University’s Dr Eleanor Parker, the celebrated specialist in the literature of medieval England and Scandinavia, about the wonder within Anglo-Saxon riddles, and how they can help us to be a bit more mindful of what’s around us.

If you’re not up to speed with Anglo-Saxon riddles, here’s one to whet your appetite:

There was a wonder on a wave: water turned to bone.

That’s it. One line. Most of them are a bit longer than that. You are no doubt sagacious sorts and have immediately clocked what the wonder being gnomically described here is, but for those at the back, it’s ice (probably – academics still debate this). Water turned to bone is ice.

Ice, as Parker told me, is not inherently a thing of wonder, but the riddle demands that you think of its wondrous capacity. It asks you to consider the sudden transformation of liquid into solid, and not just any solid, but something skeletal. It’s a simple but powerful vision, and it forces the reader to think rather more deeply than they might otherwise do about what on the face of it is a fairly ordinary subject. That is the pattern of these riddles.

“The Old English riddles are mostly contained within just one manuscript, the Exeter Book, one of the most precious collections of Old English poetry, which is from the 10th century. It has a collection of almost a hundred riddles, so quite a substantial number,” says Parker. “These are really fascinating short poems. They take some aspect of ordinary life – it might be an animal, it might be a bird, or it might be some objects that people would encounter in Anglo-Saxon society – and they present it in some kind of cryptic way. So you have to decode the clues that you’re being given to work out what’s being described.”

If this all sounds a bit familiar, but you’re not a scholar of Old English, you might have come across something suspiciously similar in the works of JRR Tolkien. The author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings was also an Anglo-Saxonist, who drew on his academic knowledge for his fantasy stories. The riddle battle between Gollum and Bilbo Baggins in a deep dark hole in the ground clearly echoes this canon (you can read more about his life and the making of Middle Earth here).

Back to the source

This is the poetry of the Anglo-Saxon period. The Exeter Book dates to the late 10th century, though the riddling tradition goes back several centuries before that, with riddles in Latin as well as Old English. The Exeter Book contains most of the riddles we know from the period. In fact, almost all surviving Anglo-Saxon poetry is found in just four priceless manuscripts, and it’s one of them. So if we want to know how to riddle like an Anglo-Saxon, the Exeter Book is the place to go. We’re lucky to still have it – though it’s been in Exeter Cathedral for a thousand years and more, it hasn’t always been handled with the utmost care, as the burn and cup marks on it attest.

To read these riddles is to see how the Anglo-Saxons saw their world. More precisely, it’s to see how learned monks saw the world. As Parker explains, though there is lots of scholarly debate about this, “what we know about riddles is that they tend to be a learned genre, for educated audiences in the early medieval period. So most likely the intended audience of these poems are monks within the monastery of somewhere like where the Exeter Book was made.”

If the riddles in this book were for an elevated audience, and perhaps even for instructional purposes for students learning how to read and write poetry themselves, that doesn’t mean the riddling psyche wasn’t widespread in society. Throughout Old English poetry, there is much use made of metaphors, or mini-riddles contained in just a word or two – calling the sea the ‘Whale Road’ for instance. So it seems reasonable to conclude that the Anglo-Saxons liked to view and characterise their world through this riddling prism.

A wonderful world

So what are we to make from this? How does this help us today? For Parker, it’s useful in reminding us to stop and take notice of what’s around us, to not take things for granted, and particularly to find the wonder in the everyday. The riddles talk of rakes and buckets, flutes and cups, but they invest them with a lot more life than you might think possible.

”Wonder is a word that comes up all the time in the riddles. It’s basically the same word as ours [in Old English, it’s wundor]. All kinds of things in the riddles are described as a wonder, even things that you wouldn’t think would be especially wonderful, so they’re trying to get you to think about how you might attach it to quite ordinary things that are not inherently wondrous. We’re not talking about miracles or magic or dragons or any of the exciting things you might find elsewhere in Anglo-Saxon literature. Here wonder is very much being attached to natural things or everyday objects. ‘What is wonder?’ is one of the questions that the poems are maybe asking us to think about.”

In other words, if you put yourself in the riddling mindset, you’re required to look more deeply at the objects that you surround yourself with, and the natural world that surrounds you. If you’re thinking riddlingly (that may not be a word, I know), you’re taking a much closer interest in the stuff of life. If we want to slow the pace, be a bit more mindful, clear the background noise of the 21st century, that’s quite a helpful technique.

“For me personally, I find it really helpful in being more mindful, more attentive to my use of technology and the ways in which it might be distracting me from the world around me and from this kind of attention that we’ve been talking about,” observes Parker. “If we have a few empty minutes, the first thing we all do – I absolutely include myself in this – is reach for our phones. We let the phone swallow our attention. Obviously there could be lots of advantages in that – I’m not saying we want to do without that kind of technology – but it isn’t necessarily always a good thing for your peace of mind, for your mental health, for the ability to concentrate on things that are important. I definitely feel that in myself. I try to remember that I have a choice in that situation, maybe not to look at the phone, but to look at what’s in front of me and to see it like an Anglo-Saxon would have seen it.”

WATCH | Dr Eleanor Parker on finding the wonder in the everyday

Losing your phone

Anglo-Saxons, of course, didn’t have the jealously addictive allure of the smartphone to contend with (though the precious pulling power that Tolkien invested in the magic rings in his fantasy stories perhaps predicted where we’re at today), so maybe it requires a bit more work for us to look simply at what’s in front of us when there are so many distractions.

While I was walking my dog the other day, I made the effort. I put the phone away and composed a riddle about a park bench. I had never paused to consider this bench before, and it was a relaxing experience, though the dog was annoyed at my meditative dawdling. Sadly, it’s an awful riddle, drafted with the pulling pressure of a lively labrador – it’s dog-driven doggerel if you will – though that’s no excuse for its lack of quality.

I’m rooted to the spot

But I’ll never grow tall

I’ll take your weight

But I can’t carry you far

I’m a friend to the homeless

And a home to strangers and lovers

It’s fair to say that I won’t be winning any riddling awards, and I very much doubt the monks of the monastery where the Exeter Book was composed would be remotely impressed with the conceptual simplicity of my effort. Nevertheless, I did find it therapeutic. I wasn’t scroll-walking on my phone or listening to a podcast as I trundled along behind the dog. I was attempting to observe that very mundane bench in a way I’d never done before. Momentarily, I got a little bit closer to the Anglo-Saxon art of wonder and close observation.

“The riddles suggest the Anglo-Saxons were very attentive to the world around them, that they really noticed things. They saw that a lot of things that we might take for granted were actually important and could produce meaning, from a religious point of view, or in terms of thinking about society,” says Parker.

“One thing that really comes across in the riddles is their interest in craft and craftsmanship, and how important it was to understand where things have come from. If you’re using objects in the early medieval period, they’ve often been made from organic materials – of wood or feathers or leather. The craft that human beings exert to turn those materials into tools or instruments or adornments for everyday life – that’s something that you find an interest in across Anglo-Saxon culture.

“That sense that each individual might have their craft, they might perfect it, they might learn from it, they might become wise through the exercise of it, I think that’s something that is really interesting in the riddles.”

Clearly there’s a comparison with that admiration of craft in the Old English poetry versus the throwaway approach that is a feature of daily life today, and I fear it’s not in our favour. I generally have little idea of the provenance of the things that I allow into my home, or the processes or people that went into making them. I buy and discard without much deliberation, and I know I’m not alone in this. Maybe if I riddled a bit more about the things that I own, I’d have a less casual approach to what I easily gather and just as easily jettison. Better for my wallet, better for my sense of wonder in the world, and better for the world to boot. I’m happy to buy into that.

It’s not just objects and craft that the Anglo-Saxons had a keen eye for. They were fascinated by the natural phenomena, fauna and flora that they came into contact with too. There are riddles about storm and sea, barnacle geese, cuckoos, badgers and foxes. The way they treat these topics in the riddles shows a sympathy with, and deep understanding of, their natural world. This was clearly a source of both wonder and wisdom for them.

The Riddle Ages

It’s worth a few minutes of anyone’s time to read some of these Old English riddles. There’s a great website called The Riddle Ages, where you can read the originals and translations, plus get the answer and a commentary on what it’s all about.

Parker is a particular enthusiast for the riddle of the inkhorn, which follows the journey of a stag’s antler from wandering the forests, to being shed by its original owner, being gathered by human hands, and being made into an inkhorn (a writer’s pot for ink). She enjoys the way the inkhorn is made to remember its past life in the riddle, and the powerful emotional attachment that the object is imbued with.

I like that one too, but for me, I’m taken with an altogether racier example. I’ll quote the first few lines, from The Riddle Ages’ translation:

A wondrous thing hangs by a man’s thigh,
under its lord’s clothing. In front there is a hole.
It stands stiff and hard. It has a good home.

It goes on in similar vein, and I imagine some of you might be thinking it is a pretty obvious depiction of a phallus. If so, perhaps you’re being misled by your baser instincts. Scholars who have looked hard at this riddle have concluded that it might also be describing a key and lock, or the scabbard of a dagger. Given that I’ve recently ignited a minor media storm over the identification of a strange dangling appendage under the tunic of a figure in the Bayeux Tapestry, which too has been argued to be either a penis or a scabbard, I feel a strange affinity with the anonymous monastic riddler from the 10th century.

Anyway, what’s the practical application of the lesson here? I guess it’s to take a look at those riddles, enjoy the skill and artistry within them, and take inspiration from them to have a go yourself. If you’re looking to put yourself in a more mindful place, find a deeper appreciation of what is going on around you, and perhaps get a little respite from the deluge of distraction that modern technology provides, then a little bit of Old English riddling might be just the trick.

This article is part of HistoryExtra’s new Life Lessons from History Substack newsletter. Subscribe to the newsletter for more articles and podcasts exploring the ways in which history can help us live better, happier, healthier or more productive lives.