Exeter Book Riddles

[6]: 175–219 The riddles are all written in alliterative verse, and frequently end with an injunction to 'say what I am called', suggesting that they were recited as oral entertainment.

[11] In this respect, they can be situated within a wider tradition of 'speaking objects' in Anglo-Saxon culture and have much in common with poems such as The Dream of the Rood and The Husband's Message and with artefacts such as the Franks Casket, Alfred Jewel, and Brussels Cross, which endow inanimate things with first-person voices.

The search for their solutions has been addressed at length by Patrick J. Murphy, focusing on thought patterns of the period, but there is still no unanimous agreement on some of them.

By representing the familiar, material world from an oblique angle, many not only draw on but also complicate or challenge social norms such as martial masculinity, patriarchal attitudes to women, lords' dominance over their servants, and humans' over animals.

If the reader pays close attention to the wording in the latter half of the riddle, however, he or she may be led to believe that the answer is a man's penis.

Riddles in which such double entendre is thought to be prominent in the Exeter Book are: 2 (ox and hide), 20 (sword), 25 (onion), 37 (bellows), 42 (cock and hen), 44 (key and lock), 45 (dough), 54 (churn and butter), 61 (mailshirt or helmet), 62 (poker), 63 (glass beaker), 64 (Lot and his family), 65 (onion), 91 (key).