Riddles and Wonders: Defining Humanity in Anglo-Saxon England

Acknowledgements

There are a number of people I would like to thank for helping me produce this book.

I am greatly indebted to Professor Carla Riviello for being a rigorous scholar and an excellent mentor; she gave me so much of her time over the last few years and helped me to sharpen and direct my ideas from the very beginning.

A special thank you goes out to Doctor Megan Cavell who welcomed me to the University of Birmingham, where I conducted part of my research, and was of enormous help to me both personally and scientifically.

I would also like to acknowledge with my gratitude the members of the Department of Humanities at University of Calabria. I am very obliged towards Professor Raffaele Perrelli and Professor Annafrancesca Naccarato for their ongoing support and encouragement; sincere thanks go also to Doctor Federica Vercillo, for her patience and expertise.

I wish also to thank Ulrike Döring at Peter Lang for her tireless assistance. I am also grateful to the series editors, whose comments and suggestions have been so valuable in the book’s development. This volume would have never seen the light of day if it had not been for their insightful comments.

The biggest thank you is reserved for my family and friends, because so much of their love came to be part of my determination to complete this research.

Preface

Jasmine Bria’s work offers an articulated analysis of the ways in which the human-animal relationship was represented in Anglo-Saxon literary documentation between the eighth and the eleventh centuries, focusing specifically on animal’s portrayals in the Exeter Book Riddles and on the monstrous depictions in the teratological treatise known as Wonders of the East.

The author attempts to explore spaces of Anglo-Saxon thought in which animality and humanity appear to meet, thus providing an original reading about specific aspects regarding Early Medieval England, through the analysis of different but complementary works, appropriately contextualized in the relative cultural context.

The volume assesses the Riddles and the Wonders of the East in their entirety before focusing the study on the rhetorical strategies directed to the subjects’ specific depictions. The work introduces and critically illustrates the origin and evolution of the enigmatographic and the teratological traditions, as well as the influences exerted on the composition of the works analysed; through a careful examination of the sources, the author reconstructs the genesis of the Riddles and the Wonders in their own manuscript tradition.

The author’s main contribution is the attempt to examine in depth, from a philological-literary standpoint, both the numerous riddle-poems centred on animal figures, reproduced through highly anthropomorphic rhetorical strategies, and the catalogue of bestial characters and monstrous peoples depicted in the Wonders of the East, allowing the complexity of the correlations between man, animal and intermediate beings to emerge.

The study reveals the diverse but correlated modalities through which the creatures described in the Wonders and the Riddles defy categorization. The Riddles’ metaphorical and metamorphic portrayals expose a universe made up of protean figures, a world of stories and entities that are always changing through time, where conceptual categories are continuously trespasses. In the Wonders, on the other hand, hybrid creatures reproduce a world of intrinsically multifaced differences, where conflicting and incompatible categories are forced to coexist.

Conducted with methodological clarity and sharp criticism, this path of textual interpretation therefore reveals the existence of a sometimes-contradictory relationship between the definitions of animality and humanity, a relationship in which the claims of a radical alteration of animal subjects are called into question. Although far from constituting an accurate reproduction of reality, the heterogeneous and complex representations analysed show that there was a manifold vision on non-human animals in Anglo-Saxon society. This work let emerge what can be considered affinity between species and a kind of concern for all that can be called different.

Carla Riviello

Introduction

The definition of an animal and its relationship to humans have been hotly contested topics throughout human culture’s history. Human societies have made numerous and varied attempts to distinguish themselves from other animal species while, more often than not, acknowledging an instinctive connection.¹ This discussion has evolved over time, involving not only the law and social life but also finding expression in the arts and literature.

The most archaic pre-Christian cultures seemed to have perceived the boundary between humans and other animals as potentially permeable.² To some extent, remnants of this perspective can be seen in various Germanic cultures; for instance, the Nordic berserker tradition suggests that for Norse people the bodily matters of men and animals could somehow merge in order for the animal to protect and sustain the man.³

Furthermore, the material culture dating back to the earlier centuries of Anglo-Saxon rule in England is rich in zoomorphic representations: jewels, caskets, weapons and armours often depict animals; thus, giving evidence to the idea that the image of an animal could transfer its own abilities to the man or the woman who wore it or carried it on. One might consider, for example, the intertwined snakes on the Sutton Hoo brooch, or the boar-crested helmets from Benty Grange and Wollostan,⁴ both of which might have had an intended use reminding of the protective helm described in Beowulf (lines 303b–306a), when a handful of Geats arrive in Denmark:⁵

[The images of boars shone on the cheek-guard, adorned with gold, coloured and hardened by fire, they kept guard on the life of the fierce men ready to battle.]⁷

In the subsequent centuries, Latin written tradition and Christian models add to the idea of this dynamic relationship another mindset which, based on the pre-eminence of rationality, instead, sees humans and animals as innately distinct from one another. Derived from natural philosophy⁸ and Late Ancient patristics, this perspective denies the presence of any intellectual faculty in animals other than humans, considering them as inferior living beings in a qualitative sense.⁹

Drawing on Augustine’s commentary on the Genesis¹⁰ (De Genesi contra Manicheos, II, 11, 16), referring to the well-known biblical passage in which God invites the newly created man to impose a name on every creature (Genesis, 2:19), Bede writes:

Causa autem adducendi ad Adam cuncta animantia terrae et volatilia caeli, ut videret quid ea vocaret, et eis nomina imponeret, haec est, ut sic demonstraret deus hominis quanto melior esset omnibus irrationabilibus animantibus. Ex hoc enim apparet ipsa ratione hominem meliorem esse quam pecora, quod distinguere et nominatim ea discernere non nisi ratio potest quae melior est (Bede, Comm. in Genesin, I, 2).

[The reason for bringing all the animals of the earth and the birds of the air to Adam, so that he could see what he would call them and give them names, is that God would thus show man how much better he was than all irrational animals. From this it becomes clear that man is better than cattle precisely by virtue of reason itself, because only reason, which is better, can distinguish and set them apart by name.]¹¹

Similarly, centuries later, in Interrogationes Sigewulfi in Genesim (XXXII, 205), a translation in Old English of Alcuin’s Quaestiones in Genesim, Ælfric expounds an analogous idea:

Hwi wolde god þæt seman adam eallu nytenum naman gesceape? Þæt se man þurh þæt undergeate hu mycele betera he wæs þurh his gesceadwisnyssa þonne ða nytenu. ⁊ þæt he þæs þe swiþor his scyppend lufode þe hine swylcne geworhte.