Old English and Anglo-Latin Riddle Tradition

"Riddles, wordplay, and enigmatic utterance have been at the heart of English literature for many centuries: if the crossword as a form is only a hundred years old, the principles that underlie its successful solution go back more than a millennium, when anagrams, acrostics, and a variety of word and sound games both within and beyond Old English and Latin, the two literary languages of Anglo-Saxon England, are attested both widely and well. The Anglo-Saxon riddle tradition is rich and reaches back: the demonstrable connection between the Old English material and a literate and learned Latinate tradition only emphasizes the importance of investigating such a link in closer focus. But it also reaches across, connecting what might otherwise seem somewhat trivial texts to a broader tradition that transcends national, temporal, cultural, and linguistic boundaries. Anglo-Saxons evidently wanted to understand the world, to explain it, and perhaps above all, to marvel at its myriad ways. The Anglo-Saxon riddle tradition poses many questions, and seems to be comfortable with the fact that for each and all of those questions there is not necessarily a single or simple and unanswerable solut