Old English Riddles

《埃克塞特书古英语谜语》一千多年来一直挑战着读者，尽管它们的状态支离破碎，风格不一致，有些文本顽固地无法解开，但仍保持着非凡的吸引力。最近对谜语的批评，借鉴了各种传统和理论方法，表明有很多新的工作可以做，但这些工作主要以文章和简短笔记的形式出现。这项研究的目的不仅是将以前零散的研究成果汇集在一起，而且还提出了对这些谜语的新解读。它将产生一个专著长度的文学分析作为一个整体的集合，基于详细的仔细阅读个别文本，并按照五大主题安排：英雄成语，家庭世界（包括性），创造的奇迹，宗教和文化。这项研究主要有三点。首先，它认为谜语不仅展示了盎格鲁-撒克逊社会，而且还展示了古英语诗歌传统的罕见临界距离。其次，它提出集合的不均匀性提供了对文本性质和功能的洞察：通过集合进行求解的求解者很少依赖过去的经验来指导求解过程，因为以前成功的方法和技术既可能引导到可接受的解决方案，也可能欺骗。第三，这项研究质疑了通常对解决方案的强调，这在过去垄断了大多数关键的努力，而是关注谜语在读者中发起的过程——即使没有找到解决方案，这个过程也可以存在，而且当找到解决方案时，这个过程不一定会停止。本研究的好处和应用包括：巩固主题，以改变谜语在古英语文学经典中的边缘地位为目标的文本新方法，以及未来研究的重点。

The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book have been challenging readers for over a thousand years and retain a remarkable appeal despite their fragmentary state, inconsistent style, and some stubbornly unsolvable texts. Recent criticism of the riddles, drawing upon various traditional and theoretical approaches, have demonstrated that there is much new work that can be done, yet this work has mainly appeared in the form of articles and short notes. This study aims not only to draw together the advances of previous, scattered studies but also to propose new readings of the riddles. It will produce a monograph-length, literary analysis of the collection as a whole, based upon detailed close readings of individual texts and arranged according to five large themes: the heroic idiom, the domestic world (including sexuality), the wonders of creation, religion, and literacy. The study has three main points. First, it argues that the riddles demonstrate a rare critical distance on not only Anglo-Saxon society but also the Old English poetic tradition. Second, it proposes that the unevenness of the collection offers insight into the texts' nature and function: a solver proceeding through the collection can rarely rely on past experience to guide the solving process, for previous successful approaches and techniques are as likely to deceive as to guide to an acceptable solution. Third, this study questions the usual emphasis on solutions, which has in the past monopolised most critical efforts, and focuses instead on the processes that riddles initiate in their readers-processes that can exist even if a solution is not found and that do not necessarily stop when a solution is reached. The benefits and applications of this study include: consolidation of the topic, new approaches to the texts that aim to change the riddles' marginal status in the canon of Old English literature, and a focus for future research.