The modern title comes from a list of his works at the end of his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (V.24.2): "librum epigrammatum heroico metro siue elegiaco" ("a book of epigrams in the heroic or elegiac meter").
[4]: 112 In Lapidge's reconstruction (and following the order of his edition), the collection included the following works, which survive in whole or in part:[4]: 91–112 A significant work of the Liber epigrammatum is nineteen "aenigmata" ("riddles, enigmas"), which survive only in Cambridge, Cambridge University Library Gg.5.35 (fols 418v-419r), a manuscript otherwise noted for containing the Carmina cantabrigensia, but also containing collections of Latin riddles by Symphosius, Boniface, Aldhelm, Tatwine, and Eusebius.
Although Frederick Tupper doubted the attribution to Bede ('the essential unlikeness of the enigmas of the Cambridge MS to those that we meet elsewhere proclaims their author's originality as truly as the inadequate diction, awkward syntax, incorrect grammar, and halting meter attest his literary limitations'),[5] Lapidge has found that metrical and grammatical infelicities in the material can be explained by scribal transmission following composition, and that the works plausibly belong to Bede.
[5] Lapidge edited the riddles as one thirty-two-line poem:[4]: 316–23 Most of Bede's aenigmata are logogriphs, for example 11 (line 15), "Peruersus bonus est, breuitati si caput absit" ("something perverse is good, if its beginning is absent through abbreviation").
A nullo pastus pascit populum numerosum: unius arte hominis perit at non fauce ualebit una namque die numquam consumtus abibit.