The practice of relational reiteration shapes the Old English and Anglo-Latin riddles. Challenged to “say what I am” without actually naming themselves, the books, bells, wild creatures, and mysteries of the early English riddle tradition respond by reiterating their own conceptual edges, drawing upon the same types of social, chronological, and physical “landmarks” that a local tenant would use to perambulate property bounds. Aldhelm, the first known English riddle-writer, declares that his aim is to “reveal with verse the hidden mysteries of things,” and his Enigmata are explicitly framed as a cosmology: an attempt to articulate the subtle links between individual elements of God’s creation. Although the Old English Exeter riddles make no such claim, these poems are even more invested in the link between identity and practice: each speaker’s physical form comes into view through the lens of their interaction with human beings. The result in both cases is transformative. Each riddle creature is “built” incrementally, piece by piece, as the riddle describes its interactions with the hierarchical world outside itself—not physically, per se, but as a conceptual entity.

Aldhelm of Malmesbury wrote important works on grammar and metre. Here excerpts are taken from his famous prose work on Virginity, with which one may compare his version in hexameter verse.Also from one of the few remaining letters, this one on the subject of education and the rivalry between the Irish and the English in this field. Aldhelm’s distinctively rheorical and inventive Latin prose was very influential in the following centuries.

Aldhelm wrote a set of 100 short riddles, following in the footsteps of earlier writers in this genre, such as Symphosius. Examples are also given here from the collections by other early eighth-century writers, namely Tatwine, Hwætberht and Boniface, including several different ways of writing a riddle on the popular subject of a pen. The riddle genre was also popular in Old English.