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Anglo-Saxon riddles are part of Anglo-Saxon literature. The riddle was a major, prestigious literary genre in Anglo-Saxon England, and riddles were written both in Latin and Old English verse. The most famous Anglo-Saxon riddles are in Old English riddles and found in the tenth-century Exeter Book, while the pre-eminent composer of Latin riddles was the seventh- to eighth-century scholar Aldhelm. Surviving riddles range from theological and scholarly to comical and obscene and attempt to provide new perspectives and viewpoints in describing the world. Some at least were probably meant to be performed rather than merely read to oneself and give us a glimpse into the life and culture of the era.〔 The Old English riddles have been much more studied than the Latin ones, but recent work has argued that the two groups need to be understood together as 'a vigorous, common tradition of Old English and Anglo-Latin enigmatography'.〔Dieter Bitterli, ''Say what I am Called: The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book and the Anglo-Latin Riddle Tradition'', Toronto Anglo-Saxon Series, 2 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009).〕 Much past work on the Old English riddles has focused on finding and debating solutions,〔E.g. Patrick J. Murphy, ''Unriddling the Exteter Riddles'' (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), p. 16, citing Glorie and Sorrell.〕 but a new wave of work has started using riddles as a way to study Anglo-Saxon world-views through the critical approaches of eco-criticism.〔E.g. Helen Price, 'Human and NonHuman in Anglo-Saxon and British Postwar Poetry: Reshaping Literary Ecology' (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Leeds, 2013), http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/6607/.〕 ==Anglo-Latin enigmata== Our earliest attested riddles in Anglo-Saxon England are in Latin, where they are known as ''enigmata'' ('enigmas') and formed a thriving literary genre which is likely to have inspired the later collection of vernacular riddles in the Exeter Book.〔Andy Orchard, "Enigma Variations: The Anglo-Saxon Riddle-Tradition," in ''Latin Learning and English Lore: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Literature for Michael Lapidge'', ed. by Andy Orchard and Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, 2 vols (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), I 284-304.〕 Unlike the Exeter Book riddles, the Anglo-Saxon ''enigmata'' are presented in manuscripts with their solutions as their title, and seldom close with a challenge to the reader to guess their solution.〔Andy Orchard, 'Enigmata', in ''The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England'', ed. by Michael Lapidge, John Blair, Simon Keynes, and Donald Scragg, 2nd edn (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2013), s.v.〕 Apparently in the late seventh century, inspired by the hundred ''Aenigmata'' of Symphosius (the only surviving collection of Latin riddles by a single author), the Anglo-Saxon aristocrat, scholar, abbot and bishop Aldhelm composed his own collection of a hundred (hexa)metrical ''enigmata''. He records that they were composed early in his career 'as scholarly illustrations of the principles of Latin versification', and may have been the work where he established his poetic skill in Latin.〔 Many were directly inspired by Symphosius's, but overall, Aldhelm's collection is quite different in tone and purpose: it seems to be intended as an exploration of the wonders of God's creation. His most prominent themes were 'the natural world, daily life, church furniture, and the classroom. A bookish quality is evident in many of the other topics addressed, which would certainly have been outside the daily experience of Anglo-Saxon England'.〔 Fittingly, the closing riddle is "Creatura", whose source is the ''Corpus Hermeticum'', Treatise XI, 20, where the Divine Intellect, the Mind of God is addressing Hermes Trismegistus.〔A.D. Nock and A.-J. Festugière, ''Corpus Hermeticum'', 4 Vols., Paris : Les Belles Lettres, 1945–1954, Vol. I, 147–157. See for an English version: Frances A. Yates, ''Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition'', London etc. : Routledge and Kegan Paul/The University of Chicago Press, 1982 (1964), 31–32.〕 Aldhelm may have known the passage through his teacher Hadrian.〔Andy Orchard, ''The Poetic Art of Aldhelm'', Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994 does not mention the ''Corpus Hermeticum''.〕 Perhaps because of its use in Anglo-Saxon education, Aldhelm's collection inspired several more Anglo-Latin riddle collections: not long after Aldhelm composed his ''enigmata'', Saint Boniface composed his own, in the form of 'a series of ten poems on the Vices and ten on the Virtues produced for the moral instruction of an unnamed female correspondent', influenced greatly by Aldhelm and containing many references to works of Vergil (the ''Aeneid'', the ''Georgics'', and the ''Eclogues'').〔 Around the same period, Tatwine composed forty, such diverse topics as philosophy and charity, the five senses and the alphabet, and a book and a pen.〔Lapidge "Tatwine" ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography''〕 Tatwine's riddles are formed in acrostics.〔Lapidge "Tatwine" ''Blackwell Encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England''〕 Alongside material objects, Tatwine also described abstract concepts like philosophy; faith, hope, and charity; and historical, spiritual, moral, and allegorical sense.〔 Tatwine's collection was then expanded to 100 by Hwaetberht (writing under the name Eusebius) through the addition of a further sixty ''enigmata'': the first six ''enigmata'' of Eusebius appear to be arranged in a careful sequence ('God'; 'angel'; 'fallen angel'; 'man'; 'heaven'; 'earth') which rapidly deteriorates into a random collection of familiar classroom topics and suchlike, culminating in the final twenty ''enigmata'' in a bizarre gathering of outlandish creatures culled largely from the writings of Isidore of Seville. It is with such ''enigmata'' that we return in spirit to the exuberance of Symposius, and, in part, to that of the vernacular Old English riddles.〔 The Lorsch riddles are also thought to have been composed in Anglo-Saxon England.〔Archer Taylor, ''The Literary Riddle before 1600'' (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1948), p. 64).〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Anglo-Saxon riddles」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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