[Sca-cooks] period riddles

[Laura C. Minnick]

At 12:29 AM 9/13/2004, you wrote:
>Lainie gave two period riddles here back on Aug 19 and then said:
>>(Not bad considering my books are still down south and  had to search 
>>online!)
>Yes, it was. How did you find these online?
>I did find and buy a book on (I think. Right now, I can't find it) 
>Anglo-Saxon riddles at this last Pennsic.
>I'd like to be able to do more bardic, and these might be good, although 
>riddles may be a problem because the entire thing needs to be memorized 
>word for word. Anyway, more sources or book recommendations would be 
>excellent, either for the Florilegium or my own use. And probably being 
>off subject for this list, unless food related, email would be fine.

Silly Stefan, now that everyone will want to know...

For searches for something like that I start with:

http://www.the-orb.net/  The ORB (On-line Resource Book)
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/sbook.html  The Internet Medieval Sourcebook
http://labyrinth.georgetown.edu/  The Labyrinth

(Those three being seriously good places to start looking for about 
anything. If you can't find it there, you're looking for the wrong thing! ;-)

It's been nearly a month now, so to best that I can reconstruct my steps, I 
found the riddles through this path:

Starting at the ORB, then click on the Encyclopedia section, top left, 
which goes to
http://www.the-orb.net/encyclo.html, scroll down to 'Literature' and choose 
Old English, to
http://www.the-orb.net/encyclop/culture/lit/oldeng.html, select 'Primary 
Sources' near the top of the page, to
http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/ballc/oe/oe-texts.html, and scroll down 
to 'Riddles', where there are several choices. The first one takes you to
http://www.georgetown.edu/labyrinth/library/oe/alpha.html, and if you 
scroll down you'll find the riddles, numbered in order. They are still in 
the Anglo-Saxon though- so to find the translation-

Dang. Link be broken.

Ok- after a Google search I found  http://www.technozen.com/exeter/  which 
has all of them translated, and after consulting the magic memory of 
Beyondo! (which is 'Lainie-speak for 'Uh, looks ok to me!') I determine 
that the translations are pretty decent.

I have to admit that it helped that I knew what I was looking for. There's 
bazillions of riddles out there. But only some of them are in the Exeter book!

'Lainie
___________________________________________________________________________
The penalty good men pay for not being interested in politics is to be 
governed by men worse than themselves. -- Plato