Find wonder in the world around you

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1:59Welcome to Life Lessons from History with me, Dave Musgrove. The concept is simple. I find a great historian and I ask them to propose a life lesson from history. Some learning from the past will help us today to live better, happier, healthier or more productive lives.

2:19Now we are going to talk about your area which is Anglo-Saxon literature and we decided the lesson is broadly along the lines of let's use old English wisdom to seek out wonder in ordinary things and I think we're going to talk quite a lot about Anglo-Saxon riddles specifically and what they tell us. Firstly can you put us where we are in time and space when we're talking about this and then introduce us to what Anglo-Saxon riddles are. Yeah. So we're talking about here, the old English literature. So the literature of the Anglo-Saxons, kind of a lot of it written down in the 9th, 10th, 11th century, that kind of time.

2:54And when we're talking about the old English riddles specifically, they're mostly contained within just one manuscript, which is the Exeter book, one of the really kind of, one of the most precious collections of old English poetry, which is from the 10th century. And the Exeter book's got poems on a huge variety of subjects, lots of different kinds of wisdom that you can find in there. But one of the things that it has is a collection of almost 100 riddles, so quite a substantial number. And these are really fascinating short poems. What they do is they kind of take some aspect of life, ordinary life, mostly, might be an animal, might be a bird, or it might be some objects that people would encounter in Anglo-Saxon society, and they present it in some kind of cryptic way.

3:36So you have to kind of decode the clues that you're being given to work out what's being described. So that's essentially what they're doing. Brilliant. And when we were chatting before, you mentioned wisdom poems as well. Are they different to riddles? You can kind of see the riddles as almost like a form of wisdom poetry in a way. Wisdom poetry is a very kind of broad term to describe. A lot of different Anglo-Saxon poems would fall into this category, including a lot in the Exeter book. And so some wisdom poems are about kind of how you acquire wisdom, you know, the wise behavior, what it means to be a wise person in your interactions with other people or in how you interact with the world around you, how you process your experiences, all that kind of that form of wisdom.

4:19And then another form of it is a kind of inherited or learned information about the world. So that might be things like understanding natural processes or, you know, the behavior of animals and birds. That's a form of wisdom as well. So it's information that makes you a better informed, more interested and more interesting person. All kinds of wisdom you can get from these kinds of poems. Now, it is to my eternal shame that I spent six years studying at Exeter, did a PhD there in medieval archaeology, and I have never seen the Exeter book. How does that make you feel about me? I'm very, very sad.

4:55I've never seen it in person myself, but it's really special because it's been in Exeter since the 11th century. So, you know, this manuscript has just been in the library in Exeter Cathedral for almost a thousand years. It's kind of brilliant. Yeah, I'm going to have to go and see if I can get down there and persuade them to let me have a look at it, because it does sound like a fascinating document. And I always wonder about it. It feels like it's such an important artefact in terms of what it contains and the fact that we don't have the documents anywhere else, that we would be absolutely lost without this book, right?

5:26Yeah, absolutely. There'd be so many different kinds of Anglo-Saxon poetry we would have no idea about if we didn't have the Exeter book. So the only – well, there are kind of four main manuscripts of Old English poetry. That's all we have that kind of preserves it for us. But the Exeter book, because of its variety, because of the range of text that it includes, if we didn't have it, our sense of Anglo-Saxon culture would be totally different. So do we know much about its story? It's just been in that library forever and that's why it's survived. Yeah, well, it hasn't always been treated very well over the years.

5:59So it's got various bits of damage to it. It's got burn marks. Someone's put a cup down on it at some point in the history. So it's not been looked after super carefully. But yeah, basically, it's just been there. So we don't know where it was originally made, presumably in some monastery in Anglo-Saxon England, but we don't know where. And we don't know, all of the poems are anonymous. So we don't know who wrote them or where they came from before they were put into the manuscript. And am I right in thinking that kind of the text runs into itself a bit? So we don't really know precisely how many riddles there are because they kind of, they run into each other and there's a bit of academic debate as to whether there's, I'm not sure what the number is, 94 or 95 or something like that?

6:37Yeah, there's a lot of academic debate about kind of where one, some end and some begin. You know, it's not always clear from the manuscript. And like I said, partly because it's damaged, some of them have big holes in the middle. So, you know, there's a lot of kind of scholarly argument about the text of the riddles. And then, of course, how you interpret them is a whole other question. Okay, so let's talk about these riddles a bit more then. I mean, do you want to give us like a bit of an example of one and a sense about the sort of things that the subjects they're tackling? Yeah, so I was thinking about various examples that I could give you and I wanted to give you one that's a really short riddle.

7:09At least this is one where people argue about how long it is or whatever, but I think it's probably just one line of poetry. And the whole riddle is, there was a wonder on the wave, water was turned to bone. That's the whole thing. So you've got that word wonder there. And we're very much being encouraged to think about what is this wonder? And in this case, it's not that difficult to solve what this wonder might be. Sometimes people still argue about what the answers to the riddles are. But in this case, presumably it's ice. So water turned to bone is ice. So then what's wonderful about that?

7:42Why is that a wonder? Because it's a very everyday thing in a way, isn't it? Ice, you know, just puddle on a cold morning or something. It's not inherently a wonderful thing. But by having it phrased as wonder, it kind of makes you think about, first of all, the nature of the thing itself. What's so wonderful about this very sudden appearance of ice that almost like it comes out of nowhere, you know, it takes you by surprise. And then secondly, what's the relationship between this image of water and bone? What do ice and bone have in common and maybe what's different about them? What makes that an interesting image to think about?

8:13So even though there's just this one line, there's a lot to kind of wonder at in it. And it's kind of making you think about a quite familiar thing in an unfamiliar way through that image. So there's a lot to unpack in it. Yeah. Did the Anglo-Saxons have a sense of wonder themselves? do you think? I mean, the actual word wonder, was that something in the vocabulary regularly used? Yeah, it's a word that comes up all the time in the riddles. And that is, you know, as I said, that's the one, the word, the old English word wonder is what's in the riddle. So it's basically the same word as ours. And all kinds of things in the riddles are described as a wonder, even things that you wouldn't think would be especially wonderful.

8:54So they really attach it, or at least they're trying to get you to think about how you might attach it to quite ordinary things that are not inherently wondrous. We're not talking about miracles or magic or dragons or any kind of exciting things you might find elsewhere in Anglo-Saxon literature. Here, wonder is very much being attached to natural things or everyday objects. And so what is wonder is kind of one of the questions that the poems are maybe asking us to think about. Who are they for, these riddles, do you suppose? Who is the intended audience? So again, lots of scholarly debate about this.

9:27but what we know about riddles at least of this kind is that they do tend to have been quite a learned genre quite an educated you know for educated audiences in the early medieval period so most likely the intended audience of these poems are monks within the the monastery of like somewhere like where the exeter book was made so the these would be people who were accustomed to thinking about the natural world and maybe thinking about it sort of from a christian point of view, how it might reveal things about the nature of God or God's purposes or creation or whatever. So that's part of kind of where the audience might be.

10:02And then also, these are people who would be very accustomed to different ways of reading. So quite complex ways of reading a whole variety of texts. And the riddles are very, they're difficult to read. Obviously, they're deliberately difficult because they make you really work very hard to try and understand them. So it's almost like a training in interpreting poetry, interpreting literature, and also interpreting the world around you, kind of reading the world, the natural world, and finding meaning in it. So in some ways, these are kind of an academic exercise for really sort of high-level learned folk.

10:36Yeah, or people who are being educated, so maybe younger people who are learning that kind of education. Okay, well, that slightly answers my next question then, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Because when I read these riddles and sort of think about them, I'm not in any way an expert like you are, but I've read a few of them. And one of the things that always struck me is, does that mean that your average Anglo-Saxon in the fields was thinking about riddles? You know, when they are, you know, pushing the plow, are they riddling themselves? Or is this really quite a specific academic monastic thing that we're seeing here?

11:09It's a very good question, actually, because I think in one way, these riddles, you know, you can trace some of the kind of based on Latin riddles or something. So you can see they do have this academic history to them or pedigree to them or something. But then I think also the very idea of riddling or this kind of approach to the world is found actually through lots of other Anglo-Saxon poems too, which might well be for other audiences. So not only for educated audiences. And so if you think about like almost any Anglo-Saxon poem you look at will have these little kind of mini metaphors, which are often called kennings, which describe something like the sun or the sea.

11:44I mean, some of the really famous ones are for the sea, calling it things like the whale's road, or you call the sun the jewel of the heavens, things like that, which are themselves almost like riddles in kind of one word where you have to think, okay, what is the jewel of the heavens? Oh yeah, I think that must be the sun, you know? And then you think about the sun in a different way. And those are found throughout Anglo-Saxon poetry. So that kind of interest in a slightly riddling approach to the natural world, to the world around you is I think not only something that you find in educated contexts.

12:14Okay, so let's imagine a scenario where I'm in the field and I'm chatting to my friend Elfrich and I want to know where the rake is and he starts going on about a strange thing crammed with teeth roaming through plots and ferreting out the frail. That would be a bit annoying, wouldn't it, in that scenario? So I just want to know where the rake is. That's right. But the very fact that he's talking about things like rakes and plows and so on suggests that the people who are reading these riddles or thinking about them are in touch with agricultural life and, you know, ordinary labour and so on. So even though they're monks, either it's teaching them about the lives of peasants and people, you know, who they might not otherwise come into contact with, or it's reflecting maybe their experience of the world outside the monastery as well.

12:51So it's not kind of divorced from everyday life, ordinary labour. It's interested in that as well. Yeah. And given that there is this kind of riddling vibe throughout the corpus of literature, kind of riddling battles, you know, where there are scenes where kings and princes riddle off against each other, like rap battles today? Probably, yeah. I think we get the best examples of that in Old Norse literature, which has some parallels to Old English poetry, definitely. So where we definitely see the idea of a contest, and some Old English wisdom poems are framed as one wise person challenging another to riddles about the natural world.

13:27Can you solve my riddle? Can a clever person solve this? The riddles themselves in the Exeter book often have a slightly confrontational, direct address to the reader. They'll say, you know, a clever person would be able to solve this. Can you solve this? Kind of the attitude they take. So it's like a test of your wisdom. I mean, I guess I'm thinking of Tolkien here and, you know, the riddle battles that hobbits have against Gollum. Is that, I mean, because he was obviously studying this literature and that was informing his writing. So that's kind of, that's in the same area, I presume? Yeah, I think that that was what inspired him with those, that idea of a riddle contest, definitely.

14:02Yeah so you mentioned Old Norse literature just then and there was obviously a lot of similarities between Old Norse and Old English but I was wondering is kind of this riddling bit is that quite specific to the Old English psyche or does it actually spread throughout the Old North for want of a better word? Yeah I think you find it in different versions in different medieval cultures because partly as I said there's a Latin tradition of riddling which obviously spreads throughout kind of all the different European countries where Latin cultures present. But then there's like all the old English riddles are very much a product of kind of Anglo-Saxon life and old English, specifically English literature.

14:38And then in Old Norse, you get kind of riddle contests, like in the Poetic Edda, for instance, where it's maybe Odin and a giant or something who are riddling with each other. So it kind of manifests itself in different ways in different cultures. Yeah. Okay. So broadly, what does this all tell us about the way people alive in the 10th, 11th century thought about the world around them? I think it suggests they were very attentive to the world around them, that they really noticed things and that they thought that a lot of things that we might take for granted were actually important and could produce meaning, could tell you about things that were important.

15:14So that might be from a religious point of view, or it might be in terms of thinking about society or whatever. I think one thing that really comes across in the riddles is their interest in craft and craftsmanship and how important that is, understanding where things have come from. So if you're using objects in the early medieval period, they've often been made from organic materials. So they're made of wood or feathers or leather or whatever, things that have come from living creatures. And then the craft that human beings exert to kind of turn those materials into tools or instruments or adornments for everyday life.

15:46Again, that's something that you find an interest in across Anglo-Saxon culture, the value of craft, the sense that maybe everybody has a particular kind of craft. So that might be working with your hands, but also often things like government are described as a kind of craft. King Alfred, when he talks about kingship, talks about it as like he's like a carpenter with his tools. Or reading and writing are often imagined as kind of book craft. That's one of their words. So that sense of the different kinds of crafts that a society needs to function and that everybody, each individual might have their craft, they might perfect it, they might learn from it, they might become wise through the exercise of it.

16:20I think that's something that is really interesting in the riddles. Yeah. Is there something here, a bit of a sense of a kickback against our modern throwaway consumer culture where artifacts have less value because they're cheaper and we don't actively engage in their manufacture? Feels like there's quite a difference there in the way that we might think about objects to people in your period because they've had to spend a lot more time making them probably. Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, and they knew where things came from. You know, I'm so conscious when I read these riddles that if I'm looking around my house, I don't know where all of the things in my house were made.

16:55I don't know what tree the wood of my bookcase grew from or whatever. And I don't know the person who made it. And I think in the Anglo Saxon period, you probably would know those things. Maybe you'd made it yourself or the guy down the road had made it or something. So you were much more conscious of the value of those objects and everything that's gone into them, the resources that have gone into them and the skill that's made them what they are. And so I think they attached value to those things in a way that we don't. It's so easy for us to be very careless or treat things like that. We can just replace them if they break or whatever.

17:25We don't necessarily allow our objects to have stories which are part of the story of our own lives. Yeah. And they did attach specific stories to objects. Now I'm thinking of weapons. They clearly thought about artifacts and objects a lot more than we do or in quite a different way. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. I mean, like swords have names, don't they? Often in, you know, Anglo-Saxon swords will have names kind of on them and that kind of thing. And you get these wonderful stories told in the riddles. One of my favourites is the inkhorn riddle, which is about an inkhorn which has been made from the antler of a stag.

17:59And it remembers being on the stag's head and travelling with the stag through this amazing, you know, on its winter journeys, this beautiful noble creature. And it's almost like proud that it was following this, its lord, they calls it. And then, of course, the stag sheds its antler. So the antler gets taken up, brought into the human world, turned into an inkhorn. And the people who use it, there's a real sense in that riddle that the human beings who are kind of digging out the antler to make it an inkhorn, they don't kind of care or know about its history, but the inkhorn remembers its past.

18:28So it very much had a life before it came into human society. And there was a value in that and a kind of an emotional attachment there, which is really powerful, really interesting. that's good just in case anyone's not clear about what an ink horn is what what is that object so that would be for holding your ink if you're you know right if you're a scribe in a monastery writing you know you dip your pen into your ink brilliant i mean but that's that's really interesting is it because that does that does suggest that they're thinking very deeply about these these objects and if there's you know i know we're trying to bring out some lessons here if there's a lesson there i suppose it's that today we we just don't think about the objects that we allow into our houses and perhaps we should be sensible to do that a bit more it feels a bit william morris-esque to think about you know have nothing in your house that's uh that's that's functional or beautiful or whatever his uh his quote was um but maybe that's maybe that's something we should reflect on a bit yeah i think so and and like i was saying about the ice riddle you know also the world outside our houses everything um about natural processes in the world there's just so much history or just so much to notice um in the world that we maybe take for granted and don't pay enough attention to.

19:33Yeah, well, let's dive into that natural world a bit, because we haven't really talked about that so much. And clearly, people living in the Anglo-Saxon period had a much closer association with the natural world just by dint of the way that they were living. That comes through in the riddles as well, I assume. Yeah, definitely. I mean, things like, I mean, some of the most interesting riddles are, they take as their subject creation, which is kind of everything in the world. So some of them try and describe as many things as you could possibly incorporate into one poem that's part of nature and part of human beings as well, who of course are one part of the natural world too.

20:07And then they're fascinated by exactly things like ice, like the sea, like trees and all the things that trees can become when they turn into wood and timber. And of course, birds, as I was saying before, birds and animals, cuckoos, nightingales, swans, oxen. There's a wonderful one which people argue about what kind of animal it but maybe like a badger or something like that, where it's imagined as a kind of someone protecting their young from sort of attacking armies. So it's a very sort of sympathetic presentation of the animal. You really kind of get inside its head and see its fear and its fierceness in defence of its children.

20:43Slap me down because I know you rightfully should, but they're not just creating these riddles because they're bored and haven't got anything else to do, are they? I don't think so. I mean, that's a good reason to do something. But yeah, no, I think there's a lot of artistry that's gone into the riddles. And the thing about them is, although they're mostly pretty short, you kind of need to spend a lot of time unpacking them. You know, you can't just skim through them and read them quickly. They require attention themselves as much as teaching you, you know, that the world requires more attention because you read the riddle and the first time around, you're probably not going to get the answer because, you know, it's being described so cryptically.

21:16And then as maybe wisdom starts to dawn, you think, oh, maybe it's that. But then you have to maybe go back and reread it and think about, oh, yes, that word, that I thought meant one thing the first time around. Now I've got an idea of the answer. It means something else. And then, so you're kind of spending a lot of time in that process of reading and thinking and interpreting. So, you know, the riddles themselves kind of occupy a lot of your attention. And they're really interested, like I said before, about that process of interpreting and reading. You know, reading itself and writing is the subject of a number of riddles.

21:46And the kind of, they're fascinated by the value of that. Just kind of how, what a wondrous thing it is that you can write down some words. One person can write down words with a pen and then someone who they've never met and never will meet can know the thoughts of their mind because, you know, through that magic of writing. Yeah. You didn't start a business just to keep the lights on. You're here to sell more today than yesterday. You're here to win. Lucky for you, Shopify built the best converting checkout on the planet. Like the just one tapping, ridiculously fast acting, sky high sales stacking, championed checkouts.

22:25That's the good stuff right there. So if your business is in it to win it, win with Shopify. Start your free trial today at shopify.com slash win. How many discounts does USA Auto Insurance offer? Too many to say here. Multi-vehicle discount, safe driver discount, new vehicle discount, storage discount, legacy. How many discounts will you stack up? Tap the banner or visit usaa.com slash auto discounts. Restrictions apply. The UPS Store is making packing and shipping Easter gifts quicker than ever this year with UPS Air. How quick? Quicker than a walk around the park. Quicker than eating all the Easter candies.

23:00Quicker than finding a golden egg that you know is stuffed with cash. When you ship UPS Air at the UPS Store, your items arrive on time or your money back. Guaranteed at no extra cost. Exclusively at the UPS Store U.S. retail locations. Send Easter joy on time at the UPS Store. Visit the upsstore.com slash air guarantee for full details. Terms and conditions apply. So I was looking back through some of the old entries on your brilliant blog and you've got some good examples of these whistoms, these kind of aphorisms, things like, it's a good year when the dog gives to the raven and never let anger have mastery over you.

23:38Better to be often loaded than overloaded. These kind of little pithy phrases that are the sort of things that your grandparents might say to you nowadays to give you some sort of sense about how to live. Is that what was going on, that people like elder members of families would be offering these words of wisdom to youngsters to give them a sense about ways to approach life? Yeah, I think that's definitely part of it. Certainly, there is a really strong association between old age and wisdom in Anglo-Saxon culture. So the idea that older people have a lot of wisdom that they can share in different ways with young people and that young people do have a lot to learn, you know, although they have energy and they have maybe creativity and whatever, that, you know, it's very important that you train younger people carefully and that they do learn from their elders.