These riddles stand as a rare example of an Old English poem surviving in multiple copies.
[1] De creatura is the culminatory hundredth poem of Aldhelm's collection of verse riddles, known as the Enigmata, and also much the longest.
The Enigmata survive included in his work on Latin poetics, the Epistola ad Acircium (presumably composed during the reign of its apparent addressee, Aldfrith of Northumbria, 685-704/5).
As the only manuscript of De creatura from Anglo-Saxon England to contain this recension is Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson C. 697, originally written on the Continent but brought to England by the earlier tenth century, and since this manuscript contains some glosses consistent with Riddle 40, it is conceivable and even likely that Riddle 40 was translated from Rawlinson C. 697 itself.
[4] Thomas A. Bredehoft has gone so far as to argue that Riddle 40 enjoys relatively little formulaic diction, but that those lines it does have in common with other Old English poems suggest a particularly strong association with other Exeter Book poems, suggesting that the translation must have been done in the mid-tenth century by someone familiar with a similar corpus of texts, and familiar with Dunstan's promotion of interest in Aldhelm at Glastonbury.