Text
Manuscript
The Leiden Riddle is attested in MS Leiden, Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, Voccius Lat. 4o 106, where it accompanies the Latin text on which it is based. The manuscript was described by Herbert Dean Merritt thus: : 25 leaves, Riddles of Symphosius and Aldhelm, ninth century. At the end of the Riddles, folio 25v, is the well-known Leiden Riddle in Old English. On folio 10r, in a space viiiat the end of chapter headings, are written in the hand of the text the Old English glosses to nymph names. The manuscript was probably copied in western France, perhaps at Fleury Abbey. The riddle was added after the completion of the main contents, fairly certainly at Fleury Abbey, in the tenth century, but the language of the text is older, of the eighth century. It was already hard to read by the earlier nineteenth century, and was further damaged by the librarian, Willem George Pluygers, who in 1864 applied reagents to the text in an attempt to make it more legible.Literary origins and character of the text
The West Saxon aristocrat, monk, scholar, and poet Aldhelm (c. 639–709) composed, among many other works, a set of one hundred hexametrical ' enigmata' or 'enigmas', inspired by the so-called '' Riddles of Symphosius''. The thirty-third was ''Lorica'' ('corselet'). This was translated into Old English, and first witnessed in the Northumbrian dialect of Old English as the Leiden Riddle; the language is of the seventh or eighth century. Unusually, the riddle is also attested, in West Saxon, among the Old English riddles of the later tenth-centuryLinguistic origins and character of the text
The Leiden Riddle is an unusually archaic example of Old English, and one of relatively few representatives of itsThe differences between these two copies are ample testament to the distances in time and space that separate them. Several are relatively superficial, representing different conventions for the spelling of what was in fact the same sound: eg. Leiden's typically early ⟨u⟩, ⟨th⟩ and ⟨b⟩, frequently appearing for Exeter ⟨w⟩ (the Anglo-Saxon letter 'wynn Wynn or wyn (; also spelled wen, ƿynn, and ƿen) is a letter of the Old English alphabet, where it is used to represent the sound . History The letter "W" While the earliest Old English texts represent this phoneme with the digraph , ...'), ⟨þ⟩ and ⟨f⟩. Reflecting a distinct pronunciation are the Leiden forms ''ueta'' (1), ''herum'' (4) and ''auefun'' (9), whose ⟨e⟩ versus Exeter ⟨æ⟩ represents one of the most important dialect divisions between West Saxon and Anglian; similarly significant are the vowels in, e.g., Leiden ''heh'' (4) rather than ''heah'', ''uarp'' (5) as opposed to ''wearp'', ''biað'' (5) next to ''beoð'', and so on. In general, there is a far greater range of unaccented vowels in Leiden, another feature of an early date (before these merged; compare, e.g., ''innaðae'' (2) with ''innaðe'', ''hlimmith'' (6) with ''hlimmeð''); and some important differences in inflexional endings (viz. Leiden's early preterite plural ''auefun'' (9), Exeter's late ''awæfan'').Richard Dance, 'The Old English Language and the Alliterative Tradition', in ''A Companion to Medieval Poetry'', ed. by Corinne Saunders (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 34-50 (p. 41).
Editions and Translations
* Foys, Martin ''et al.'' (eds.Recordings
* Michael D. C. Drout,References
{{Reflist Riddles Old English literature