Truth is Trickiest: The Case for Ambiguity in the Exeter Book Riddles

Multivalence, ambivalence, and semantic queerness are among the principal categories engaged by Jennifer Neville in her invigorating approach to the long- and much-debated collection of some ninety-five Old English riddles preserved in the Exeter Book. Thus, the unique feat and aim Neville proposes in her captivating monograph is a change of perspective on the Exeter riddles. Instead of pursuing what has long been taken for granted as standard practice in their studies, the search for unambiguous solutions, Neville convincingly argues for the need to acknowledge and embrace their innate ambivalence. In her view, the Exeter riddles, which, as is well known, do not have titles nor any other hint at answers save for occasional runic signs, were intentionally designed to be ambivalent and equivocal. Therefore, the book focuses not on making the most of what is present in the Exeter collection but on what is mainly absent there. Neville claims that the riddles’ dearth of unambiguous, singular answers or solutions creates an apophatic, liberating, and inspiring perspective of looking for senses in this lack. She consistently and successfully proves her point by arguing that a number of riddles shimmer with various meanings. The benefits of including this possibility in Old English riddle studies and for the broader study of Old English mentalities are both diachronic and synchronic: Neville competently argues that by instilling the state of uncertainty in their audiences, riddles serve the purposes of cognitive training by demanding careful readings of reality, eliciting suspiciousness of assumptions and never taking the world for granted. The benefit of all that for scholarship is evident as, in these appeals, we recognize the heuristic method of probing for senses. However, in the approach proposed by Neville, we may also acknowledge the presence of early medieval exegetic thinking, with its logocentric attitude to polysemic and pansemiotic divine creation.Neville opens her monograph with her own list of riddle titles, which is as fascinating as it may be perplexing: for instance, Bright-Headed stands for Riddle 19 or Brainlocker for Riddle 73. Inspired by what Neville sees as the most characteristic element of each riddle poem, these succinct appellations have already featured in her earlier works on riddles (notably in Riddles at Work in Early Medieval Tradition, the 2020 collection she coedited with Megan Cavell). They read like kernels to the riddles and are much more about inviting us, their readers, to be puzzled about their senses than about proposing unambiguous solutions. What follows is Neville's introductory chapter in which she lays out her premise, stressing the difference in the form and principle between the Latin and Anglo-Latin riddle collections and the Exeter Book riddles. It is there that she delves into the mechanics of ambiguity in the riddles and promises to “solve and re-solve some riddles again and again” (p. 17), which she does throughout with much success. She sees the “trickiness” of the riddle's truths as an opportunity premeditated by their author(s), who willfully refrained from complementing the riddles with solutions. Whether Neville's hypothesis about the intentionally absent solutions is persuasive, it certainly makes for an inspiring take on the collection.The analyses and interpretations of the book's subsequent six chapters are constructed around the riddles’ use of the heroic code as the dominant and instantaneously recognizable communication trope to early English audiences. Neville explicates this in chapter two, “The Joy of Limits: The Heroic Idiom as ‘Code’,” making a valid point, given the number of riddles that depict strife or that use military or heroic vocabulary. Exploring how the riddles employ the idiom begins in the chapter with the conspicuous uses of heroic imagery by the seemingly unambivalent riddles. Still, Neville is quick to prove that despite its dominance in the collection, the heroic idiom lends the riddles their specific power to confuse and shape-shift. Moreover, Neville persuasively demonstrates that awareness and knowledge of internalized heroic idioms help fill the physical textual gaps in fragmentarily surviving riddles, as, for instance, in Riddle 71. Chapter three, “Muddying the Waters: The Heroic Idiom as Camouflage and Disguise,” looks at how the heroic idiom is applied in the riddles as a form of disguise in nonheroic contexts. Neville's careful and novel reading of Riddle 80 as a Christian message in heroic disguise is particularly noteworthy in this respect. “Suspiciousness of the familiar” (p. 83), as Neville puts it, is the sine qua non of the unriddling process. This focus on the riddlic ambivalences and multivalences enables Neville to make numerous inspiring observations, like that on the riddles as providing space where “not only things but also values are held up for review and questioning” (p. 104). In chapter four, “Dark Tracks through the Heroic Idiom: Aporia, Irony, and Paradox,” Neville discusses the deliberately ironic, confusing, or paradoxical use of the heroic idiom in the riddles. Here, as elsewhere, her passion and the intellectual joy that exude from the book are contagious. They are evident in the tantalizingly teasing level of philological sensitivity that Neville achieves with her analysis of Riddle 5 in this chapter, only to enhance it as she revisits the riddle in the book's conclusions, where she adds a perspective on it that is a tour de force in the study of textual queerness. Chapter five, “Domestic Practices: Manufacturing and Implements,” applies thing theory and Michel de Certeau's practice of everyday life to the riddles concerned with minor tropes within the heroic idiom. Neville notes here that one of the fundamental modes of the riddles is their application of uncertainty with regard to their riddling tropes and that even if their subject matter may appear trivial, the Exeter riddles address such fundamental issues as those of social hierarchies. Finally, in chapter six, “The Strange Game of Sex: Asexual Reproductions and Gratuitous Sex,” Neville joins the ranks of those critics who have attempted to resolve the issue of why it is that sexual themes are openly present in a manuscript that is a product of the Benedictine Reform period. Compellingly, her point is that the erotic riddles are by far more challenging than simply moralizing tests for careless readers eager to spring at the sexual solution or focus on the riddles’ supposed salaciousness. Neville argues that the sexuality of the double entendre riddles is incongruous with what appear to be expected connotations with sex. Not only is it tellingly devoid of procreation, as she demonstrates, but sinfulness and pleasure are also notably absent from the sexual riddles. Sexual acts function in them as metaphors for other actions recognizable to early English audiences and are related to issues of social class and gendered nobility. The book is complemented by a short chapter in which Neville asserts the openness of her analyses and interpretative propositions to future reevaluations and reinterpretations in new readings of their ambiguities that the Exeter riddles will inspire. In support of this, Neville's book closes with over forty pages of an appendix, where she accomplishes a gargantuan task of collating a complete list of proposed riddle solutions from their earliest nineteenth-century studies to the present. Aptly titled “The Argument over Solutions,” it serves as testimony to how ambiguous most of the riddles have been to their commentators. On numerous occasions, Neville contributes to scholarly debates over the solutions by proposing new readings, such as those to Riddle 4 and Riddle 5, Riddle 53 and Riddle 80, and others. With their elegance, ingenuity and power of persuasion, they deserve attention and will become significant contributions to future debates.If there is one thing that I find conspicuously absent from all the intellectual ferment and insight that Neville's book brings so bountifully, it is a new take on what happens between the Exeter riddles as a whole or at least within their groups. Neville's work hardly ever, if at all, engages with the occasionally perplexing arrangement of the riddles in the manuscript. As she moves back and forth between them, the ambivalences ensuing from their positioning towards one another remain unexplored. That said, Neville's monograph offers an abundance of erudite gems with many masterful interpretations and careful emendations of the previously suggested riddle solutions that are effectuated by the book's focus on riddlic ambiguity. For instance, particularly exquisite and engaging is Neville's reconstruction of the process of clouding, decoding, and reading of the heroic runic Riddle 19, in which she recreates the alternative movements from confusion to understanding, depending on whether its audiences were or were not familiar with runic signs and hinging on the revelation in the riddle's final command. A pleasure to read also because of the liveliness of its style, Jennifer Neville's Truth Is Trickiest counts as a fresh, engrossing, and animating enquiry into the mechanics of the ceaselessly fascinating Exeter riddle poems.