Despite their ludic nature, riddles have long been recognized by scholars as a valuable source of insight into the cultures that generate them. In certain contexts, the presentation and solution of riddles can serve important social functions, including initiation, commemoration or the transmission of collective social wisdom or belief.Footnote 1 However, an important distinction between riddles and other means of sociocultural communication is their two-part structure: the inseparable pairing of question, posed by the riddler, and answer, supplied by the audience.Footnote 2 The cultural insights to be gained from riddles are therefore predicated on knowledge of both elements. For the riddle to be meaningful, one must know, with reasonable confidence, both the question and its intended solution.Footnote 3
For these reasons, the approximately ninety-five Old English poems known as the Exeter Book Riddles (Exeter, Cathedral Library, 3501) have proven both valuable and notoriously problematic as a source of insight into the early English culture that produced them.Footnote 4 On one hand, the wide-ranging riddles have been treasured by scholars as a ‘catalogue of ephemeral objects’, a representation of cultural artifacts and practices otherwise unattested in the surviving Old English corpus.Footnote 5 Although some of the riddles are based on Latin precedents, ‘the majority are likely true folk products’, reflecting the contemporary values and experiences of their creators.Footnote 6 As such, they offer tantalizing views into the everyday cultures of early medieval Britain and, particularly, that society’s collective understanding of certain material objects they encountered on a regular basis.Footnote 7
On the other hand, as Jennifer Neville has emphasized, the Exeter Book Riddles are a problematic source of sociocultural insight because none of them actually includes a recorded solution.Footnote 8 Thus, we must solve each riddle as accurately as possible before we can fully access the information it preserves. This endeavour is complicated, first, by our distance from the original source, and second, by the nature of the riddles themselves, which are intentionally designed to obscure, rather than emphasize, their proper solution.Footnote 9
The majority of the Exeter Book Riddles have been solved to the satisfaction of the scholarly community. However, there remain several riddles in the Exeter Book for which no comprehensive solution has yet been firmly identified. It is important to continue trying to solve them, since fixing the solutions will unlock the full range of cultural insights to be gained from these texts.
Foremost among these problematic specimens is Riddle K-D 55, which has been called ‘a stumper’, and ‘one of the most challenging riddles to be found in the Exeter Book’.Footnote 10 Although a number of answers have been proposed, there has not yet been a consensus identification of the object this riddle describes. The text reads:
Previously proposed solutions have included a shield or scabbard; a liturgical cross and/or gallows; a drinking bowl and barrel; a harp; a reliquary; and a tetraktys.Footnote 12 Among the most widely supported solutions are also a range of answers having to do with the storage of weapons, including a sword box, a rack or a hanger.Footnote 13
However, as John D. Niles explains, in addition to being aesthetically satisfying, a reasonable solution to any riddle must succeed in three key areas: lexical accuracy, textual comprehensiveness and historical plausibility.Footnote 14 Thus, the ‘correct’ solution for Exeter Book Riddle 55 must be based on the most likely interpretation of each word in the text; it must comprehensively address every detail in the riddle; and, it must correspond ‘to some reality known to have been within the grasp of the Anglo-Saxon riddler’.Footnote 15
Based on these criteria, and as earlier scholarship has demonstrated, each of the previously proposed solutions to this riddle is problematic in at least one major respect.Footnote 16 For example, ‘cross’ is linguistically problematic as a primary solution, as it necessitates the translation of abæd (12b) as ‘ward off’, rather than ‘force, compel, demand’ or ‘receive’ (from abiddan). As Williamson explains, such a reading ‘is certainly stretching both the meaning of abæd and the natural syntax of the line’, but without such a modification, it is unclear how the Cross ‘receives’ or ‘demands’ a sword for its liege lord.Footnote 17 For practical reasons, ‘scabbard’ and ‘shield’ are problematic with regard to the object’s composition from four types of wood (9–10a).Footnote 18
Each of the other proposed solutions proves similarly unstable with regard to certain clues: for example, a gallows is no more likely to receive swords (12b) than a cross is, nor is the gallows likely to be composed of four kinds of wood or associated with gold or silver (3b–4), or be carried into the mead hall during a feast (1–2b). Nor would either a harp or a cross necessarily be associated with the four specific types of wood the riddle names.Footnote 19 On the other hand, while Keith Taylor’s solution ‘mead bowl and barrel’ accounts for the specific woods on the riddle-poet’s list, the connection between these objects and the sign of the Cross (5) is less clear.Footnote 20 The associations between the Cross, gallows and the sword box or rack are similarly uncertain.Footnote 21
Finally, the widely accepted weapons-storage solutions (box, rack and hanger) are problematic on a historical level. Even the main proponents of these solutions note that there is little evidence that such objects would have been familiar to the riddle’s original audience. As Williamson indicates, for example, ‘there is no evidence in Old English literature or Anglo-Saxon archaeology for the existence of an early English sword rack. There is no Old English word for sword rack and there are no manuscript illustrations of sword racks in any early English manuscripts that I have seen.’Footnote 22 Similarly, of his own proposed *wæpen-hengen (or *wæpen-treow or fyrd-wæn), a rack or wagon for the storage and transportation of armaments, Niles concedes that the terms are ‘unattested in the extant records of Old English’, either literary, archaeological or artistic.Footnote 23 This lack of attestation makes it less likely that any of these items would have been familiar enough to early medieval audiences to work as a riddle solution in this culture.
Moreover, despite practical assumptions that such apparatus must have existed, several passages from Beowulf specifically depict weapons set aside in other ways.Footnote 24 In this text, Geatish shields are laid or stacked on the floor, spears leaned against the wall; helmets are rested and byrnies draped along mead-hall benches, ‘as was their custom’ (wæs þeaw hyra, 1246).Footnote 25 Even Beowulf’s high-value corselet and heirloom sword are handed over to a companion for safeguarding, rather than relegated to rack, box or hanger.Footnote 26 Again, such evidence challenges the idea that weapon-storage objects would have been familiar to the original audience. Thus, according to the criteria for a successful riddle solution outlined above, neither of these popular proposals, nor the other previously offered solutions, can be fully confirmed as ‘correct’. Moreover, since the riddle is as yet unsolved, the cultural insights to be gained from it remain only incompletely accessible.
For these reasons, I propose a new approach to Riddle 55 of the Exeter Book, identifying the riddle-object in question as a military banner or standard (OE segn or cumbol). Although relatively understudied by scholars, such military standards are well attested in Anglo-Saxon literary and historical records, and surviving depictions of such objects, visual as well as written, closely resemble the riddle-object in appearance, nature and use.Footnote 27 The answer ‘banner’, ‘standard’ or segn (a) meets the qualifications for an accurate solution, including that of the object’s familiarity and significance to the original audience; (b) reasonably satisfies each of the clues offered in the riddle (both overt and implied); (c) comprehensively resolves a number of the more complicated points raised by earlier readings of this riddle; and (d) uncovers a level of sociocultural significance previously unrecognized in this text.
At the expense of the poetry, but with emphasis on the outline of this new solution, I translate Riddle K-D 55 as follows:
I saw, carried out onto the floor in the hall where men drank, four kinds [of a thing]:
-
(1) a wondrous wood-tree,Footnote 28 and
-
(2) twisted gold, cunningly bound treasure,Footnote 29 and
-
(3) a portion of silver, and
-
(4) the sign/token of the Cross (of him who raised a ladder up to the heavens for us,Footnote 30 before he destroyed the city of the hell-dwellers).
I am readily able to sing before noblemen of that beam’s inherent virtues. There was:
-
(A) maple,Footnote 31 and
-
(B) oak, and
-
(C) brave yew, and
-
(D) dusky holly.
All together, they are useful/dutiful/profitable for the lord.
They have one name – wolf’s-head tree – that often abæd Footnote 32 weapons – treasure in the hall, gold-hilted sword – for the liege-lord.
Now answer me this riddle, who presumes to say in words what this wood is called.
This schematic rendering foregrounds the key aspects of the riddler’s question as well as highlighting several textual features that have proven problematic in previous readings. It also draws attention to the carefully crafted structure of the riddle, which divides the information provided by the poet into three main sections: first, a description of the riddle-object’s physical context and appearance (1–7a); second, a description of its intrinsic nature and/or composition (7b–10a); and third, an elaboration on its sociocultural function, role or use (10b–14a).
CONTEXT AND APPEARANCE (LINES 1–7A)
First, the riddle introduces the mystery object in context, as it is in healle, þær hæleð druncon, / on flet beran (1b–2a).Footnote 33 These introductory lines suggest that the object in question is portable, and that it probably belongs in a mead hall, in the company of warriors, since that is where the riddling voice claims to have seen it. Further consideration of this particular phrasing within the larger Old English poetic corpus also suggests that the object is likely to be a culturally significant one, closely associated with heroic violence, dominance, prestige and power.
First, as Megan Cavell observes, ‘the term flet is consistent with the heroic imagery of the hall’, and ‘occurs frequently in heroic contexts’.Footnote 34 As such, this choice of words would likely have laid a foundation for the heroic resonances of the object and its environment in the minds of the original audience. In Beowulf, moreover, the phrase on flet boren … þær guman druncon, a close variant of the K-D 55 wording, refers to the presentation of an extraordinary war trophy: the slain Grendles heafod (1639b, ‘Grendel’s head’) dragged into Heorot and laid before the Danish king, Hrothgar, his queen and his court.Footnote 35 Beowulf himself characterizes this prodigious head as tires to tacne (1654, ‘a token of victory, glory or honour’), a simultaneous confirmation of his heroic triumph over this monstrous enemy and of his exceptional service to the king.
Another informative verbal parallel to the opening lines of Riddle K-D 55 appears at the end of Riddle K-D 56, the poem in the Exeter Book collection immediately following the one under consideration here.Footnote 36 In this example, the poet reiterates the formula þær hæleð druncon, … on flet beran (11b–12a), but adds, first, that the item carried is a laf (10b) – a term whose meanings range from ‘vestige’ to ‘heirloom’ to ‘survivor’ – and, second, that it is presented minum hlaforde (11a, ‘to my lord’).Footnote 37 Although the solution of Riddle 56 also remains subject to some debate, scholars agree that the diction is heroic, and that the overall effect is that of a high-value war prize or trophy (metaphorical or otherwise) being presented to a liege lord or king, as a token of victory following a violent struggle.Footnote 38 Thus, based on the poetic precedents of the Old English corpus, Riddle 55’s opening lines present the object not only as portable and belonging in a mead hall among feasting warriors, but also as associated, like a battle standard, with heroic themes of violence, victory and a warrior’s loyal service to a lord.Footnote 39
The poet builds on these initial impressions of the portable, heroic symbol of dominance, prestige and service in battle with a detailed physical description of the riddle-object as feower cynna (2b): that is, either ‘one thing with four aspects’, or ‘four separate things’.Footnote 40 The four elements in question are listed (that is, wrætlic wudutreow (3a); wunden gold (3b); seolfres dæl (4b); and rode tacn (5a)), with each separate item being marked off by the conjunction ond.
The solution proposed here for Riddle K-D 55 – segn, or ‘battle standard’ – fits with each aspect of the poet’s description of the riddle-object’s physical appearance. Early medieval military banners, modelled on Roman prototypes (vexilla), were all comprised of the same basic elements: a long staff or pole, usually wood; rich metallic ornaments; and a cloth pendant or banner suspended, near the top, from a shorter cross-bar attached at right angles to the main pole.Footnote 41 Each of these elements corresponds with an item from the poet’s list.
First, the description wrætlic wudutreow (3a, ‘wondrous wood-tree’) accords well with the tall shaft of the standard, which was typically made of wood and measured up to half again the height of its bearer.Footnote 42 Not only in size but also in shape, the impressive wooden pole could not have seemed all that far removed from its origin as a ‘tree of the woods’.Footnote 43
Wunden gold (3b) is also a recognizable feature of medieval battle standards, which are frequently described as golden and closely associated with other valuable treasures in Old English literature. For example, in Beowulf, Scyld Scefing’s followers adorn his funereal treasure ship with a lofty segen gy(l)denne, / heah ofer heafod (47b–48a).Footnote 44 Similarly, a segen gyldenne (1021a, ‘golden banner’) is first among the four dynastic treasures with which Hrothgar rewards Beowulf for his defeat of Grendel. Finally, Wiglaf recovers a luminous segn eall gylden (2767b, ‘a banner all golden’) from the slain dragon’s hoard. The riddle’s elaboration on the mystery object’s ‘twisted gold’ as sinc searobunden (4a, ‘cunningly bound treasure’) further reflects an artisanal value also emphasized in these Beowulf banners: Hrothgar’s ancestral banner is hroden (1022a, ‘adorned’); and the dragon’s, hondwundra mæst, / gelocen leoðocræftum (2768b–2769a), is so intricate an artifact that it seems to have been made by magic.Footnote 45
Lavish adornments, like those on the riddle-object and in the literary examples, also characterize several battle standards mentioned in historical sources. For example, in their records of the Battle of Hastings, both William of Malmesbury and William of Poitiers describe the personal standard of King Harold Godwinson as a ‘Fighting Man’ richly embroidered in gold and gems.Footnote 46 The Roman vexilla that likely inspired such Anglo-Saxon standards also featured luxurious textiles, as ‘in later times (perhaps after the middle of the third century AD) vexilla were purple … with much gold interwoven’.Footnote 47
The riddle’s context in the Exeter Book also supports the identification of the wunden (3b, ‘braided or plaited’) gold as high-value textile. As noted above, the next riddle (K-D 56) in the Exeter Book describes a wounded, struggling creature whose vestiges are – in an exact echo of Riddle 55 – þær hæleð druncon […] on flet beran (K-D 56, 10–12b), and presented to the lord like a trophy. This riddle is usually solved as ‘warp-weighted loom’ or ‘loom and web’, where the object borne out onto the hall floor, like the object in K-D 55, is the valuable cloth that the loom has produced in the stylized heroic encounter.Footnote 48
As well as such ornate, heroically associated textiles, wunden gold (3b) and sinc searobunden (4a) could also refer to adornments on the shaft of the segn. Among the Romans, the pole of the military signum was often gilded and studded with gems.Footnote 49 As Margaret Deanesly explains, ‘the signum of the legion […], a wooden lance with similar sharp metal tip, for sticking in the ground’, could also be ‘silver-plated and enriched with a series of discs, fillets, and metal ornaments’.Footnote 50 Thus, Anglo-Saxon emulation of Roman military prototypes could likewise account for the riddle-object’s seolfres dæl (4b, ‘portion of silver’).
The fourth item on the poet’s list of cynna – the rode tacn (5a, ‘sign of the Cross’) – takes priority in many readings of this riddle, and Frederick Tupper’s proposed solution, ‘cross’, is one of the most popular solutions to K-D 55. However, as Niles has suggested, the very thing that makes that solution so tempting also makes it unlikely, since naming the actual solution in the riddle ‘would be too much of a give-away’.Footnote 51
From a practical standpoint, a battle standard fits with this clue as well as it does the other three criteria, while avoiding the idea that the poet has explicitly stated the answer, rode, in his text. As noted above, the cloth banner on the traditional standard was suspended high on the shaft by a shorter cross-piece that would serve as a rode tacn.
Even though some legionary signa did not have the cloth component, ‘all Roman standards have horizontal projections of some kind’, which would produce the cruciform shape required of the riddle-object.Footnote 52 In Christian contexts, moreover, the Cross was also a popular battle-standard motif, being inwoven or embroidered onto the cloth banner, affixed on top of the shaft, or both, as in several manuscript illustrations.Footnote 53 The pervasiveness of these motifs thus suggests a number of ways in which a battle standard could have ‘betokened’ the rood, just as the riddle-poet specifies.
Perhaps the most famous of battle standards, and the one which corresponds most directly to many of the criteria outlined so far, is the labarum of the Roman emperor Constantine: the military ensign inspired by his vision of the Cross and subsequent conversion to Christianity (Fig. 1). According to the Vita Constantinus of Eusebius, who claims to have seen the object first-hand, the emperor’s labarum was a
tall pole plated with gold [which] had a transverse bar forming the shape of a cross … From the transverse bar, which was bisected by the pole, hung suspended a cloth, an imperial tapestry covered with a pattern of precious stones fastened together, which glittered with shafts of light, and interwoven with much gold, producing an impression of indescribable beauty on those who saw it.Footnote 54
Although Eusabius’s testimony was written centuries before the Exeter Book was compiled, Cynewulf’s Elene bridges the temporal gap between this imperial Roman prototype and the Anglo-Saxon context of the Exeter Riddles. Elene also describes in detail the emperor’s miraculous vision and the standard it inspires; and, like the mystery object of Riddle 55, the object of Constantine’s vision is both tacen and treo, and richly decorated with gold and gems.Footnote 55
Fig. 1: Labarum of Constantine, I AE Follis Reverse, type RIC VII Constantinople 19, 307–37 CE. © Classical Numismatic Group, Inc.
As some readers have suggested, it is possible that these textual commonalities, bolstered by parallels to the gold-and-gem-encrusted Cross of The Dream of the Rood and the adornment of the True Cross in Elene, further support the solution ‘cross’.Footnote 56 However, as Eusebius’s description of the labarum illustrates, and Elene reflects, the rode … tacen Constantine adopts after the vision is not a lavishly adorned cross, but rather a cruciform segn (124), a battle standard whose shape and embellishments are designed to evoke the Cross that inspired it.Footnote 57 Thus, solving Riddle 55 as ‘standard’ reflects even more comprehensively than ‘cross’ the distinctive parallels between the riddle-object and Constantine’s hybrid martial-religious ensign, emphasizing the cruciform imagery as well as accounting for the heroic elements the riddle-poet also includes in his description.
The poet further elaborates on his rode tacn with an allusion to the Harrowing of Hell (5b–7a), the days between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection during which Christ laid siege to Hell and freed the virtuous pagans. First, this digression highlights the rode tacn enough to make it a good ‘decoy possibility’: a strategically misleading push towards an alternative solution common to the riddle genre.Footnote 58 At the same time, however, this allusion also underlines the heroic aspects of the riddle-object, pointing beyond the Cross itself to something more complex and specifically militaristic.
The poet’s evocation of Christus Victor, who helwara / burg abræce (6b–7a, ‘destroyed the city of the Hell-dwellers’), encourages the audience to associate the object with Christ in his martial persona. The characterization would likely have reminded the audience of contemporary visual and liturgical representations of the Harrowing of Hell, in which the image of Christ carrying a cruciform battle standard was a ubiquitous motif.Footnote 59 The digression also reflects the Anglo-Saxon tendency to represent Christ as the ideal warrior-king, and prioritizes interpretation of the rode tacn in a combination of martial and ecclesiastical, rather than exclusively religious, contexts.Footnote 60
Fig. 2: Harrowing of Hell © British Library Board. Cotton MS Tiberius C. vi, f. 14r.
Fig. 3: Detail of banner from Fig. 2 © British Library Board. Cotton MS Tiberius C. vi, f. 14r.
Venantius Fortunatus’s famous hymn ‘Vexilla Regis proderunt’ (569 CE) further illustrates the symbolic equation of banner and Cross in Christian discourse at this time. The hymn calls the Cross ‘the standard [vexillum] of the King’ (line 1), as well as ‘wood’ (ligno, line 12) and ‘tree’ (arbor, line 13). Moreover, like the object in the riddle, this particular royal military banner is also closely related to Christ’s conquest of Hell (Praedamque tulit tartare, line 20).Footnote 61 The resemblances between the vexillum in the hymn and the riddle-object, including their close associations with Christ’s military persona and his victorious campaign against Hell, suggest again that ‘banner’ (segn or its synonyms) would have been a culturally accessible answer to Riddle 55 – informed, enriched and complicated, but not exclusively defined, by its symbolic associations with the liturgy.Footnote 62
From an academic perspective, this proposed solution also resolves the lingering question of whether feower cynna (2b) indicates ‘four kinds of thing’ or ‘a thing of four kinds’.Footnote 63 If the four objects in the list in fact refer to the various components of a battle standard, then the poet’s evocative visual description of the riddle-object encompasses both possibilities, since one could perceive a segn, or standard, as four distinct components – wood, gold/cloth, silver, cross-piece – unified into a single, ornate whole.
NATURE AND COMPOSITION (LINES 7B–10A)
After this physical description of the riddle-object, the poet describes its intrinsic nature and composition. His introductory claim, Ic þæs beames mæg / eaþe for eorlum æþelu secgan (7b–8),Footnote 64 establishes an important lens through which to interpret the subsequent clues.Footnote 65 First, by emphasizing the ease with which an audience of noblemen would appreciate the æþelu (8b, ‘inherent qualities’ or ‘intrinsic nobility’ or ‘lineage’) of the beam (7b) – the poet reiterates his earlier placement of the riddle-object in a heroic context, and reinforces the relationship between the object and the men drinking in the mead hall where it appears. More specifically, he encourages the audience to interpret the ensuing list of trees – hlin, acc, iw and holen (9–10a) – as eorlum most likely would: in a secular, aristocratic, martial register.Footnote 66
Framed in this way, Riddle 55’s second list begins with its most difficult item. Hlin as a tree name is otherwise unattested in Old English, and opinion is divided as to its meaning. The Dictionary of Old English glosses it as ‘linden’ or ‘lime tree’, but the editors note that hlin has also, ‘less plausibly’, been identified as cognate with Icelandic/ON hlyn, ‘maple’, as in Bosworth-Toller.Footnote 67 In fact, considered from the perspective of the noblemen in the poet’s ideal audience, either interpretation reinforces the authoritative and martial connotations of the riddle-object.
First, linden wood is well-known as the main material for Anglo-Saxon shields.Footnote 68 Linde serves as a substantive kenning for scild (‘shield’) in Old English poetry, and reference to this type of tree would easily have conjured images of battle under linde in the mind of the aristocratic warrior.Footnote 69 Any thought of battle would likely also have brought to mind the lord’s segn, which in poetry even becomes synonymous with the men who rally and fight beneath it.Footnote 70
Alternatively, identifying hlyn as maple, speaks – like the gold and silver in the poet’s initial description – to the artisanal excellence and high-value materiality of the riddle-object. Maple is a ‘fine-grained or even-textured wood […] probably reserved for specialist items’, including ‘cups in the royal burial of Sutton Hoo’, mead or ale flasks, and musical instruments such as the harp.Footnote 71 Maple, like linden, was also sometimes used for shields.Footnote 72 In each case, the attested uses of maple associate it not just with high-level craftsmanship, but also with the social experiences – hall joys, mead sharing, music and battle – that bound the comitatus and their lord together. Thus, the inclusion of hlyn among a banner’s compositional ‘virtues’ makes sense from practical, artistic and socioculturally symbolic standpoints.Footnote 73
Likewise, acc (9a, ‘oak’), would have had heroic connotations among the company of the mead hall, the noble male audience to whom the poet imagines he might ‘most easily’ convey the riddle-object’s inherent qualities. For example, in the Old English Rune Poem, the oak is characterized in terms reminiscent of a faithful retainer, who ‘keeps faith [treow] nobly’.Footnote 74 The pun on treow (‘faith’) and treow (‘tree’) underlines the oak’s symbolic associations with a warrior’s dedicated service to a lord – a characterization further reinforced by the tree’s reputation as formidable and steadfast; its poetic synonymy with the ships made of its wood; and its common use, like linden/lime and maple, as material for shields.Footnote 75 From a more practical standpoint, the size, strength and durability of an oak beam would also have made it a good candidate for the shaft of a heavily adorned segn. Footnote 76 Thus, like the linde, the acc has symbolic as well as practical connections with the war banner and its associated values in an Anglo-Saxon heroic context.
The next tree on the list, iw (9b, ‘yew’), first appears in the Old English Rune Poem as valuable firewood – a source of the warmth and comfort in the hall.Footnote 77 It was also used to make weapons, such as bows; and, like maple, was material for drinking cups and other aesthetically significant artifacts.Footnote 78 Indeed, both woods were routinely included among more high-value objects, in the feast hall and in lavish burials like the one at Sutton Hoo, even though the early English ‘had ready access to precious metal and exotic imports’.Footnote 79 This suggests that they may have been valued by aristocratic warriors for symbolic reasons as well as practical ones.
On a more symbolic level, yew was associated with ‘death and regeneration’, as well as ‘immortality and protection against evil’.Footnote 80 Moreover, the hearda (9b, ‘hearty’) yew is steadfast, ‘hard and firm in the earth’, like the oak tree and the ideal warrior.Footnote 81 Most importantly for Riddle 55, archaeologists have also suggested that yew may have been one type of foliage used to adorn the type of standard called a t(h)uuf, mentioned in several poetic and historical sources including Cynewulf’s Elene and Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum. Footnote 82 Thus, this element of the riddle-object’s æþelu (8b, ‘lineage’ or ‘inherent qualities’) could have reminded the listening eorlum of their most fundamental values – feast and hall joys on one hand, and, on the other, the absolute loyalty and deadly service to their liege lord. It could even have suggested actual vegetal adornment on that lord’s banner or segn, among the intrinsic parts of which the poet includes this hearda iw. Footnote 83
Finally, holen (10a, ‘holly’) likewise has practical and symbolic connections to the world of the aristocratic warrior. A ‘dense, hard and heavy’ wood, holly ‘burns very hot and was used by smiths and weapon makers’ as fuel for the forge. That the same wood was also ‘used to make spear shafts’, would further reinforce its association with the tools and practice of warfare, as well as making it – like the oak – a good material for the main shaft of a standard, or its cross-piece. In addition, holly ‘has been used historically for carving and inlay work’, so it could also have been incorporated into artistic embellishments of an ornate artifact like a standard.Footnote 84 Each tree on the list could thus have conjured facets of heroic warfare in the minds of the noble warriors in a lord’s mead hall – the riddle-poet’s stated ideal audience – as well as providing practical components for the well-adorned battle standard the poem describes.Footnote 85
SOCIOCULTURAL FUNCTION (LINES 10B–14A)
Finally, the last section of the riddle addresses the sociocultural role and/or uses of the object in question, and again a battle standard answers the criteria offered. First, the poet indicates that, ætgædre (11a, ‘together’), these component woods frean sindon ealle / nyt (10b–11a).Footnote 86 Most readings of Riddle 55 have emphasized the nyt (‘useful, advantageous, dutiful, profitable’) part of this description, but the solution offered here also emphasizes the object’s specific usefulness to a frean (‘master’ or ‘lord’).Footnote 87 For example, any weapon-storage apparatus would have been useful to all warriors equally, as would the drinking bowl; the gallows arguably more useful to the community than the lord alone; and the Cross, though indispensable to Christ’s salvific mission, perhaps less directly identifiable as advantageous or profitable to a war leader in his hall.Footnote 88
On the other hand, a standard, segn or cymbol, is both practically and symbolically useful to the early English lord specifically. First, on the battlefield, ‘standards served as a focus, rallying point, and transmitter of orders’, both an emblem and a tool of the commander’s authority over his men.Footnote 89 Again, the symbolic importance of the banner in this regard is reflected several times in Beowulf, where a lord’s fighting forces are identified in one instance as under segn, and elsewhere simply as segn. Footnote 90 The emblematic centrality of the banner is likewise underlined in Beowulf’s recollection of the way he avenged King Hygelac’s death: he targets and slaughters a figure he identifies not as the king’s killer, but as the standard bearer of the enemy who slew him.Footnote 91 Elsewhere, early English writing on the emperor Constantine emphasized the belief that ‘the labarum will bring luck in battle’, which would be another way the banner would prove useful to a lord in times of war.Footnote 92
In addition, an enemy leader’s banner could prove just as advantageous to a warlord or king as his own, offering both a clear target during a battle, and a valuable trophy afterwards. For example, as Wace records, Harold’s ornate ‘Fighting Man’ banner served as a focal point for Duke William’s attack at the Battle of Hastings, as ‘he made every possible attempt to reach the standard with all the forces he had brought with him’.Footnote 93 After William’s targeted onslaught proved successful, moreover, ‘[t]hat same standard, after his victory, was sent by William to the pope’.Footnote 94 Even when they were not as lavish as Harold’s ‘Fighting Man’ (or the object of Riddle K-D 55), the adversary’s captured banner was an important token of victory for the winning side, the material value of the object itself being enhanced by the symbolic appropriation of the fallen leader’s authority and his defeated people’s collective prestige.Footnote 95
Elsewhere, historical evidence suggests that the banner was equally useful to the early English king off the battlefield, as an emblem of his royal authority. Indeed, the lord’s banner may have been the primary indication of his royal status.Footnote 96 As Chaney has suggested, ‘the standard or banner’ was ‘more important than the crown as a sign of Anglo-Saxon kingship’, and, as a number of scholars have observed, the Venerable Bede records in detail the Northumbrian king Edwin’s reliance on his royal banner to convey his power, dignity and authority.Footnote 97 In these respects, a standard is more useful to a lord than to anyone else, in ways that the noble warriors in the Anglo-Saxon mead hall would readily have recognized.Footnote 98
Then, in what is perhaps the single most difficult clue in Riddle 55, the poet suggests that this aristocratically useful, composite wooden object ‘has one name’ (11b), wulfheafedtreo (12a, literally ‘wolf’s-head tree’). Established readings of this hapax see it as a kenning for ‘gallows’, since, ‘to “bear the wolf’s head” is to be an outlaw, while “a tree for outlaws” is a gallows’.Footnote 99 In fact, in a number of cases – as with rode tacn – this detail has been taken as the answer itself: either ‘gallows’ or ‘cross’, where ‘cross and gallows are interchangeable terms for the instrument and symbol of Christ’s crucifixion’.Footnote 100
If we assume instead, as others have, that the wooden object is not literally a gallows but ‘must resemble a gallows whether in looks or in function’, then a Roman-inspired military standard fits here as well.Footnote 101 The cross-piece and pendant banner easily mirror the elevated rectangular profile of the Anglo-Saxon gallows, which are depicted in manuscript illustration as two uprights and a cross-beam.Footnote 102
However, although the ‘gallows’ reading of the wulfheafedtreo compound is reasonable – and fits with the proposed solution segn – it may be worth revisiting the assumption that this is the only way to read this unusual term. For example, such a reading is problematic on a practical level since (as others have objected of scabbard or shield) a gallows comprised of four types of wood would be complicated and, most likely, structurally unsound.Footnote 103 Moreover, while traditional readings of the wolf’s-head tree as ‘gallows’ assume both that ‘wolf’s-head’ means ‘outlaw’ and that the tree in question is for hanging, neither of these are fully verified by the riddle.Footnote 104 In fact, as Taylor and Williamson observe, ‘no critic who has translated the term in this manner has been able to explain in a reasonable fashion the relationship between the gallows and the proposed subject of the riddle’ – which suggests that the interpretation may need some reconsideration.Footnote 105
There are several different ways to read this tripartite naman from the perspective of the riddle-poet’s ideal audience of noblemen in the mead hall. In each case – as with the list of trees – the multiple valences of each term in wulf-heafed-treo (and their combinations) can all be logically associated with the battle standard and its place in Anglo-Saxon society.Footnote 106
For example, the first element, wulf, has clear significance in a martial context, as the wolf was often used as a symbol for the ferocity of early medieval warriors.Footnote 107 In Beowulf, both the Geatish warrior Wulf, brother of Eofor, and the eponymous hero’s own name demonstrate the close association between wolves and formidable, accomplished fighters.Footnote 108 Elsewhere, the historian Plutarch describes early Germanic warriors as fighting in zoomorphic array, ‘splendid equipment with helmets resembling the open jaws of terrible beasts of prey and strange animal faces’.Footnote 109 The famous ‘beasts of battle’ motif, which pairs wolves with ravens and eagles as emblems of war, makes it likely that the wolf would have been well represented among these animal-headed warriors.Footnote 110
There may even have been judicial precedent for the association of warrior and wolf’s-head. In one early English law code, at least, the distinction between thief and warrior is mainly a matter of numbers: ‘We use the term thieves if the number of men does not exceed seven, band of marauders for a number between seven and thirty-five. Anything beyond this is a war band.’Footnote 111 Depending on the number of his company, then, a warrior could (also) have been an outlaw, or ‘wolf’s head’, especially to his enemies. Thus, ‘wolf’ and ‘wolf’s head’ could easily have carried martial significances as well as legalistic ones for the riddle’s mead-hall audience.
Alternatively, if treo(w), like beam, can be interpreted as a synonym for a banner on its pole (as it is in Elene), then the ‘wolf-head tree’ could easily refer to a battle standard featuring a wolf’s-head motif.Footnote 112 Although no known example of a wolf standard survives from the Anglo-Saxon period, there is a range of historical evidence supporting the probability that such a thing existed. First, there are records of several types of animal appearing on (or serving as) military banners among the early English and their contemporaries. For example, Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum records a golden dragon as the royal standard of the West-Saxon war leader Ethellium at the Battle of Burford (AD 752), and of King Edmund at the Battle of Assadun (AD 1016).Footnote 113 Bulls’ heads adorn the (presumed) royal standard discovered at Sutton Hoo; and Vikings during the same period were known to carry banners featuring the raven, a beast of battle like the wolf.Footnote 114
Furthermore, archaeologists have demonstrated that early medieval English banners were most likely modelled after those labara and vexilla represented on coins that circulated in Britain.Footnote 115 Among these Roman precedents, ‘animal totems’ were also commonplace, and Roman historian Pliny lists ‘wolf, minotaur, horse, and boar’, along with the famous praetorian eagle, as the most popular of these.Footnote 116 The British section of the Notitia Dignitatum (c. 395–430), an illustrated catalogue of all official Roman insignia of the late empire, likewise depicts a number of wolf motifs, including ‘what appear to be wolf-headed flagpole finials’.Footnote 117 With this device in particular, lingering Roman influences could readily have translated into a ‘wolf’s-head tree’ banner among early English nobility.
Yet another possible Roman precedent for the ‘wolf’s-head tree’ as a military banner is the draco, or dragon, standard. Originating with barbarian tribes of the Danube but widely adopted for use among Roman imperial forces, the draco standard ‘flew from the top of a staff and had a wolf or snake’s head with a free-flowing, sinuous body’ made of cloth.Footnote 118 The T-shape created by the intersection of the creature’s head and the staff meets the rode tacn criterion of the riddle, while the intricate gold and silver metalwork commonly found on the heads correlates to the riddle-object’s wunden gold and seolfres dæl. Footnote 119 As the description above suggests, moreover, these standards were often hybrid creatures, with the body of a dragon but the head, specifically, of a wolf.Footnote 120
Historical and visual records confirm that these wolf-headed, serpentine banners would have been familiar to the early English. First, as Deanesly indicates, the Roman draco was ‘the distinctive banner of the Britons’.Footnote 121 Moreover, the Welsh used these banners tactically as well as ceremonially, which further fulfills the requirement that the riddle-object be ‘useful to the lord’ (10b–11a).Footnote 122 The same device also appears twice on the Bayeux Tapestry, where ‘each standard … exhibits a wolf-head, fore-legs, and wings’.Footnote 123 In each case, as with the Roman precedents, the draco banners attested in early medieval English contexts fit neatly with the components and characteristics of the object described in Riddle 55.
The idea that wulfheafedtreo could refer to an early medieval English battle standard seems even more likely when one considers the analogy of this term to an equally striking hapax in Beowulf: eaforheafodsegn (2152a). The word refers to the banner that Beowulf receives from Hrothgar and turns over to his king, Hygelac. Emphasizing the rarity of any triple-compound construction in Old English, Mackie has explicitly suggested that ‘eaforheafodsegn, “boar’s-head ensign”, is clearly formed upon a model, that of wulfheafodtreo, “wolf’s head tree”’, in Riddle 55.Footnote 124 Although he still translates the latter term as ‘gallows’, the commonalities – especially the attested poetic interchangeability of treo and segn – strongly suggest that these two unusual compounds refer to the same type of object.
Additionally, in Elene, Constantine prepares for battle under an eofor-cumbol (79, ‘boar standard’) before replacing it with his newly inspired cruciform labarum. Footnote 125 In this context, at least, the boar standard and the labarum (which is also called treo) are analogous. Thus, the only real difference between these contemporary Old English descriptions of battle standards and the riddle-object called ‘wolf’s-head tree’ seems to be the substitution of one animal (the boar) for another (the wolf), which is just as closely associated with the power and prestige of heroic warriors and kings.
The fact that wulfheafedtreo (12a), the poet’s challenging name for his composite riddle-object, fits in so many ways with the proposed solution ‘banner’ or segn again recommends this as a viable answer for Riddle K-D 55. Specifically, the interpretations offered above relieve the longstanding critical difficulties with this term and its place in the rest of the riddle, most of which stem from the established reading of the poet’s hapax as ‘gallows’.Footnote 126 The multiple poetic and historical intersections between ‘banner’ (segn) and the poet’s challenging clues underscore both the deftness of the riddler and the comprehensive cultural resonances of the object he describes.
The final clue offered by the poet is that this useful, oddly named object ‘often abæd weapons – treasure in the hall, gold-hilted sword – for the liege-lord’ (12b–14a). As noted above, the meaning of abæd has been another point of contention in previous interpretations of the riddle. This problematic verb has been identified as a form of abiddan, and thus translated ‘to ask, pray, pray to, pray for, obtain by asking or praying’; or of abædeþ, and thus ‘to force, wring, compel, demand, require (where something is due)’. Other proffered translations include ‘to offer’, ‘to receive’ and, most controversially, ‘to ward off’.Footnote 127
In other proposed solutions, each of these interpretations works mainly in isolation. For example, the Cross could be said to ward off weapons, offering God’s protection to the lord; or else, more abstractly, to receive weapons or treasure offered as gifts to the church. But it is less clear how a cross would ‘ask for’ or ‘offer’ weapons, treasure or sword for or to a lord – especially in his mead hall, where the poet situates the riddle-object.Footnote 128 A harp could be said ‘to ask for’ or even ‘require’ the scop’s payment from an obliging lord, but it, too, seems unlikely to offer him weapons.
The drinking bowl and barrel might accompany the lord’s distribution of treasure at a feast, but they would neither offer nor receive such treasure directly, nor require nor obtain weapons. The gallows would be unlikely to have any direct involvement with weapons or treasure, especially in relation to the liege lord or his comitatus in the hall.Footnote 129 The solutions in the ‘weapons-storage’ group – including chest, scabbard or rack – are understood to receive the weapons stored within it, and, arguably, also to offer them back up for use.Footnote 130 However, such an interpretation minimizes the active implications of this verb: the sense that the riddle-object is itself somehow conveying the demand or compulsion on its lord’s behalf. By their nature, the scabbard, sword box or weapons rack could receive and ‘offer’ only passively.Footnote 131
On the other hand, a military standard encompasses most, if not all, of the possible meanings of abæd, including even the most controversial. First, as emblem of the lord’s authority and, by extension, the mondryhtne (13a, ‘lord’) himself, a standard could be said ‘to demand’ (or, less generously, ‘to force’ or ‘to compel’) – and ‘to obtain by asking’ – the loyal service of each elite warrior and goldhilted sweord (14a, ‘gold-hilted sword’) in the lord’s fighting force. Moreover, on the battlefield, the segn would simultaneously boost the morale and coordinate the efforts of these sworn warriors, thus working to ‘ward off’ the weapons of the enemy.Footnote 132
After the battle, the banner, again standing metonymically for the lord himself, would traditionally ‘require as due’, and ‘receive’, any maðm in healle (13b, ‘treasure in the hall’) collected by his victorious retainers. In return, the banner-lord would also be expected to redistribute these materials among his comitatus, ‘to offer’ weapons and treasure to the receiving warriors, in exchange for their past – and future – efforts on his behalf.Footnote 133 Thus, the poet’s use of the multivalent abæd deftly encompasses all aspects of the reciprocal relationship between the mondryhtne and his men, just as early English people would have recognized the riddle-object, the segn, as both emblematic of the lord’s power and synonymous with the elite warriors he commanded.Footnote 134
CONCLUSION
Finally, the poet challenges the listener to answer the riddle, to name the wudu (16b, ‘wood’), his song describes. This formulaic closing subtly reminds the audience of the object’s previous identification as treo and beam – both of which are synonyms for the labarum, Constantine’s famous battle standard, and deftly evoke the segn’s height, composition and basic shape.
In all three main aspects – appearance, composition and use – a battle standard satisfies the poet’s description of the mystery object in Riddle K-D 55. It is portable and belongs in a mead hall among noble men. It is adorned with gold and silver and closely associated with animal symbolism; and it is useful to a lord in all the specific ways the riddle suggests. Solving the riddle as segn or ‘banner’ accounts for the high-value materiality of the object and its cruciform shape as well as its associations with weapons – each of which has been prioritized independently in various previous readings of the text. It also accounts, within the poet’s own specified context, for the list of trees that defines the object’s intrinsic qualities; and it allows for internally consistent interpretations of abæd and wolfsheafodtreo, both of which have presented significant difficulties in previously proposed solutions.
Segn (‘banner’ or ‘battle standard’) also answers all of the scholarly criteria for a viable riddle solution, including comprehensiveness, lexical accuracy and contextual plausibility. It reasonably incorporates all the information provided by the poet; satisfies all the clues (both overt and implied); and addresses a number of the issues, linguistic and historical, raised by earlier interpretations of the text. It does so, moreover, with a riddle-object that is well attested in surviving early medieval English sources, both written and visual, and is thus demonstrably familiar to the riddle’s original audience.
Solving the riddle in this way unlocks for modern readers both the cultural complexities of the riddler’s ‘enigmatic definition’ in K-D 55, and the sociohistorical resonances of the object he defines.Footnote 135 Recognizing the riddle-object as a segn illuminates the riddle’s insights into the relationship between a lord and his warriors; the interlacing of secular and religious imagery in mead hall as well as monastery; and the enduring investment of early English identity, royal authority and collective power and prestige in high-value, high-status objects like the lord’s banner, segn or cumbol. For all of these reasons, I propose that this should be the new ‘standard’ solution for the long-perplexing Exeter Book Riddle 55.Footnote 136
