Exeter Book Riddle 33 (according to the numbering of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records)[1] is one of the Old English riddles found in the later tenth-century Exeter Book. Its solution is accepted to be 'Iceberg' (though there have been other proposals along similar lines). The most extensive commentary on the riddle is by Corinne Dale, whose ecofeminist analysis of the riddles discusses how the iceberg is portrayed through metaphors of warrior violence but at the same time femininity.[2]

Text and translation

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As edited by Craig Williamson[3] and translated by Corinne Dale,[4] the riddle reads:

Editions

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  • Krapp, George Philip and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie (eds), The Exeter Book, The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), https://web.archive.org/web/20181206091232/http://ota.ox.ac.uk/desc/3009.
  • Williamson, Craig (ed.), The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), no. 31.
  • Muir, Bernard J. (ed.), The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry: An Edition of Exeter Dean and Chapter MS 3501, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2000).
  • 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

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  • Michael D. C. Drout, 'Riddle 33', performed from the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records edition (25 October 2007).
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References

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  1. ^ George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie (eds), The Exeter Book, The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), http://ota.ox.ac.uk/desc/3009 Archived 2018-12-06 at the Wayback Machine.
  2. ^ Dale, Corinne, '(Re)viewing the Warrior Woman: Reading the Old English “Iceberg” Riddle from an Ecofeminist Perspective', Neophilologus, 103 (2019), 435-49; doi:10.1007/s11061-018-9588-2.
  3. ^ The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book, ed. by Craig Williamson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), [no. 31].
  4. ^ Dale, Corinne, '(Re)viewing the Warrior Woman: Reading the Old English “Iceberg” Riddle from an Ecofeminist Perspective', Neophilologus, 103 (2019), 435-49 (p. 438); doi:10.1007/s11061-018-9588-2.