Exeter Book Riddle 27 (according to the numbering of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records)George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie (eds), The Exeter Book, The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936). is one of the Old English riddles found in the later tenth-century Exeter Book. The riddle is almost universally solved as 'mead'.Helen Price, 'A Hive of Activity: Realigning the Figure of the Bee in the Mead-Making network of Exeter Book Riddle 27', Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies (2015), 1-19 (p. 1); .Wendy Hennequin, 'Commentary for Riddle 27' (8 September 2014), https://theriddleages.wordpress.com/2014/09/02/commentary-for-riddle-27-2/.
Text
As edited by Krapp and Dobbie in the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records series, Riddle 27 runs:
Interpretation
Until recently there has been little work on this riddle. However, in recent years commentary has emphasised how it undermines the association with mead in Old English heroic poetry with martial masculinity.Wendy Hennequin, 'Commentary for Riddle 27' (8 September 2014), https://theriddleages.wordpress.com/2014/09/02/commentary-for-riddle-27-2/. Other work has shown how the riddle not only elucidates Anglo-Saxons' relationships with bees, but has argued that the riddle enables us to chart the complex interrelations between humans and other ecological actors in the medieval past.Helen Price, 'A Hive of Activity: Realigning the Figure of the Bee in the Mead-Making network of Exeter Book Riddle 27', Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies (2015), 1-19; doi:10.1057/pmed.2015.1.
Editions
Williamson, Craig (ed.), The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977). Muir, Bernard J. (ed.), The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry: An Edition of Exeter Dean and Chapter MS 3501, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2000). Foys, Martin et al. (eds.),Old English Poetry in Facsimile Project(Madison, WI: Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture, 2019-). Online edition annotated and linked to digital facsimile, with a modern translation.
Recordings Michael D. C. Drout, 'Riddle 27', performed from the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records edition (24 October 2007).
References