Exeter Book Riddle 9 (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), p. 185. is one of the Old English riddles found in the later tenth-century Exeter Book, in this case on folio 103r–v. The solution is believed to be 'cuckoo'.Megan Cavell, translation and commentary for Riddle 9, The Riddle Ages: Early Medieval Riddles, Translations and Commentaries, ed. by Megan Cavell, with Matthias Ammon, Neville Mogford and Victoria Symons (Birmingham: University of Birmingham, 2020 [first publ. 2013]).Jennifer Neville, 'Fostering the Cuckoo: Exeter Book Riddle 9', Review of English Studies, 58 (2007), 431–46.Dieter Bitterli, 'The Survival of the Dead Cuckoo: Exeter Book Riddle 9', in Thomas Honegger (ed.), Riddles, Knights and Cross-Dressing Saints: Essays on Medieval English Language and Literature (Bern, 2004), 95–114. The riddle can be understood in its manuscript context as part of a sequence of bird-riddles.Richard Fahey, 'Encoded References in Exeter Book Bird-Riddles', Medieval Studies Research Blog: Meet us at the Crossroads of Everything (6 December 2019).
Text
As translated by Harriet Soper, Riddle 9 runs:
Editions and translations
Megan Cavell, translation and commentary for Riddle 9, The Riddle Ages: Early Medieval Riddles, Translations and Commentaries, ed. by Megan Cavell, with Matthias Ammon, Neville Mogford and Victoria Symons (Birmingham: University of Birmingham, 2020 [first publ. 2013]) Foys, Martin et al. (eds.) Old English Poetry in Facsimile Project (Madison, WI: Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture, 2019-). Online edition annotated and linked to digital facsimile, with a modern translation.
Recordings
Michael D. C. Drout, 'Riddle 9', performed from the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records edition (19 October 2007).
References