The Exeter Book Riddles provide insight into how early English medieval people felt about their place in the non-human world by giving voice to many non-human creatures. Riddle 26 depicts the creation of a manuscript from the perspective of a sheep becoming a page. Holsinger (2009) notes how the theme of the poem necessarily draws our attention to the paradoxical nature of the manuscript, as both “a book produced by and for human” and “a stack of dead animal parts”
Metamorphosis, as a rhetorical strategy, depicts the fuidity and the disorder characterizing the universe, because it represents the situation in which any entity with еheir own precise identity – becomes something diferent (Bynum,
2001, pp. 28–33).
not crossed out words from each text, translated
1. sticky fly trap
2. honey (but adjective)
3. window
4. asking
5. with movement
6. inaccesible
7. eating through
8. around
9. dissapearing
10. getting closer
1. torture
2. blue
3. woollen
4. flower
5. itchy
6. pigeons
7. love (making)
8. cutting
9. ear
10. redness
1. stuck
2. war
3. dream
4. night
5. kitchen
6. women
7. children
8. after
9. close (eyes)
10. together
1. sitting
2. thinnest (subtlest?)
3. dragonfly
4. in front
5. love
6. then
7. so
8. close
9. lacy - frilly
10. hugging
There are several reasons for which I choose this riddle as a model for the analysis of my research practice. First, the form of the riddle is not dissimilar to the manner in which I conduct my research, searching for puzzles, (un)related events, semiotic coincidences. Second, the extreme use of pain. A woman, sentenced to be hung, stands in the dismembered body parts of her own dog stuck in her shoe. And the dog is called love. There are so many layers of absurdity and beauty here. I also tend to work with painful subject matter (wars, heartbreaks, fears) in an allegorical, playful kind of way. And, perhaps most importantly, the collaged nature of the riddle, the confidence with which it combines narratives and visual cues, shedding light on unexpected ways of looking at that which is ‘known’.
1. close by
2. window
3. birch tree
4. almost
5. riddle
6. shock
7. polka dots
8. naked
9. hiding
10. hour
1. forest
2. sky
3. here there
4. there here
5. inside
6. looking
7. leg (but little)
8. all sorts
9. barely
10. noticeable
1. bodies
2. close by
3. moon
4. pipe
5. drops
6. clump
7. braid
8. twisting
9. around
10. each other
