Exeter Book Riddle 61 (according to the numbering of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records)George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie (eds), The Exeter Book, The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936). is one of the Old English riddles found in the later tenth-century Exeter Book. The riddle is usually solved as 'shirt', 'mailcoat' or 'helmet'. It is noted as one of a number of Old English riddles with sexual connotationsJacqueline Fay, ‘Becoming an Onion: The Extra-Human Nature of Genital Difference in the Old English Riddling and Medical Traditions’, English Studies, 101 (2020), 60-78 (p. 64); . and as a source for gender-relations in early medieval England.Melanie Heyworth, 'Perceptions of Marriage in Exeter Book Riddles 20 and 61', Studia Neophilologica, 79 (2007), 171-84.
Text
As edited by Krapp and Dobbie in the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records series (with the addition of marking of long vowels), and translated by Megan Cavell, Riddle 61 runs:
George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie (eds), The Exeter Book, The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), p. 229, accessed from http://ota.ox.ac.uk/desc/3009 . Often a noble woman, a lady, locked me fast in a chest, sometimes she drew me up with her hands and gave me to her husband, her loyal lord, as she was bid. Then he stuck his head in the heart of me, upward from beneath, fitted it in the tight space. If the strength of the receiver was suitable, something shaggy had to fill me, the adorned one. Determine what I mean.'Riddle 25 (or 23)', trans. by Megan Cavell, The Riddle Ages (10 April 2017).
Editions Smith, Kyle (ed.) Old English Poetry in Facsimile Project (Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2019-).
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