Critical interest in early medieval riddles is at an all-time high. Recent years have seen a spate of noteworthy monographs by Dieter Bitterli, Mercedes Salvador-Bello, Patrick Murphy, and John D. Niles, while articles dedicated to individual riddles or riddle-clusters have poured forth in profusion. Where scholarship in the previous century tended to treat the Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book as a genre distinct from the Anglo-Latin enigmata, more recent studies tend to study them together, as facets of a single tradition. Edited by Megan Cavell and Jennifer Neville, Riddles at Work in the Early Medieval Tradition: Words, Ideas, Interactions continues in the same vein. Most of the essays in the collection explore how the vernacular riddles speak in a fruitful dialogue with wider Latin riddling and encyclopedic traditions. In this way, they reposition the vernacular riddles squarely within the intellectual milieu of Anglo-Saxon England.

The sixteen essays are organized into three sections, representing the philological, theoretical, and comparative approaches, respectively, although the divisions are not hard and fast, and most of the essays involve close readings and several are comparative in nature. This is true for even the theoretically informed essays; while many of them draw on the language of recent theory—thing theory, new materialism, and gender criticisms, among others—they rely heavily on the combination of close reading and comparative study that remains the bread and butter of medieval riddle scholarship.

The authors, representing a mix of established scholars and newer voices, present a range of new riddle solutions and new models for reading the riddles. Neville proposes “sun” as the solution to Riddle 4, commonly solved as “bell” (chapter 1); Pirkko A. Koppinen's consideration of the materiality of fire in Riddle 30a-b leads her to propose the solution ora (“ore”) in place of “tree” (chapter 15); and James Paz claims that the storms depicted in Riddles 1–3 describe not only the natural world but also apply to the inner world of the mind (chapter 11). Other essays present new approaches or emphases. Corinne Dale brings an ecofeminist perspective to Riddle 84, arguing that the powerful female figure in the riddle on water “does not reinforce the negative stereotyping of women and nature” (190). Other essays explore emotion, cognition, identity, and sexuality: Jonathan Wilcox takes up the question of riddle humor, while Rafał Borysławski considers the transformative effects of fear in the riddles, which “may serve as a form of therapy to alleviate existential ills” (158). Several chapters move beyond the vernacular riddles to focus on Aldhelm's engimata. Peter Buchanan ponders the blurring of animal-human boundaries in Aldhelm's leech riddle (Enigma 43), and Enigma 65 (“mouse-catcher”) provides Cavell with grounds for reconsidering the question of the domestication of cats in the early Middle Ages. Essays by Francesca Brooks and Robert Stanton bring welcome attention to the play of sound in the vernacular riddles. Additional essays consider the riddles both as ways of knowing and vessels of knowledge, taking up “conceptual blending” (Karin Olsen, chapter 6), “enigmatic knowing” (Britt Mize, chapter 14), astronomical knowledge (Neville Mogford), riddle topoi in its transmission (Mercedes Salvador-Bello), and sexuality and wonder (Sharon E. Rhodes). The collection concludes with Miller Wolf Oberman's experimental translation of the fragmentary Riddles 84, 89, 92, each rendered in multiple ways in an attempt to convey the textual lacunae of the damaged manuscript.

Edited collections are by their nature wide-ranging and multifarious; nonetheless, two recurrent threads are discernable in the volume. The first is the insistence on the multiplicity of solutions and approaches. While it is unlikely that the new solutions proposed in this volume will displace the more established ones, this does not seem to be a point of great concern for the authors. The new solutions are not meant to be the last word, but part of an ongoing engagement and interaction with these texts, and the same is true of the various theoretical frameworks applied. Multiplicity and diversity are the watchwords of the collection. As Cavell and Neville write in the afterword, “[w]e hope this collection has revealed there is no single ‘right’ way to read these texts” (288). In this view, what the riddles invite, and incite, is ongoing engagement. In Mize's formulation, “[a] riddle is at its heart less a question to be answered than a cultural apparatus for thinking about the world” (251).

A second and related thread that runs throughout the collection is an emphasis on intellectual function of the riddles. The aesthetic delight of medieval riddles can make one forgetful of their pedagogical and encyclopedic purposes. What these essays forcefully demonstrate is just how deeply embedded both vernacular and Latin riddles are in the world of early medieval learning. As a result, we can see the riddling tradition more clearly for what it was: not a lighthearted diversion from monastic learning, but the very means of that learning.

One additional feature of Riddles at Work should be noted here regarding its nomenclature. Cavell and Neville implement a new naming system for the Exeter Book Riddles in an effort to replace the unwieldy numbering system currently in use. The current system is based on the numbering of George Philip Krapp and Elliot Van Kirk Dobbie's Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records edition of the Exeter Book, with its scheme of 95 separate riddles; this numbering is typically superimposed upon the texts of Craig Williamson's 1977 edition of the Exeter Book Riddles, which renumbers them to 91. To surmount this confusing situation, Cavell and Neville advocate a naming system that uses key Old English words from each riddle to serve as its title. Riddle 5 thus becomes Anhaga (“lone-dweller”; Karin Olsen, chapter 6), taking its most salient word as the title. This is an elegant solution to a long-standing problem and one that avoids the tendentious practice of using one's preferred solution for the title. The use of Old English words as titles may prove an impediment to nonspecialists, however.