Anglo-Saxon Riddles
Translated by John Porter
This is a book full of ingenious characters who speak their names in
riddles. Here you will meet a one-eyed garlic seller, a bookworm, an
iceberg, an oyster, the sun and moon and a host of others from the everyday
life and imagination of the Anglo-Saxons. Their sense of the awesome
power of creation goes hand in hand with a frank delight in obscenity,
a fascination with disguise and with the mysterious processes by which
the natural world is turned to human use.
John Porter's sparkling translations retain all the vigour and subtly
of the original Old English poems, transporting us back over a thousand
years to the roots of our language and literature. This edition contains
all 95 Exeter Book riddles.
5
A5 ISBN 1-898281-13-0 112 pages