About

This website builds on work from The Riddle Ages blog, which was active from 2013-2020. The aim of that blog was to provide Modern English translations of all the Old English riddles found in the late 10th-century Exeter Book, along with commentaries on interesting aspects of each riddle.

The website you’re visiting was funded by the AHRC “Group Identity and the Early Medieval Riddle Tradition” project. The website’s aim is to provide translations of the entire early medieval riddle tradition — including the 7th- and 8th-century Latin riddles that inspired the Old English riddles.

You can find original texts, their translations, and commentaries by clicking through the “Riddle Collections” tab at the top of the page.

Keep an eye on the home page for announcements, as we work our way through the new content.

How to Cite this Website:

If you’re citing the entire resource, you can include something like the following (depending on which style-sheet you’re using):

  • The Riddle Ages: Early Medieval Riddles, Translations and Commentaries, ed. by Megan Cavell, with Matthias Ammon, Neville Mogford, Jennifer Neville, Alexandra Reider and Victoria Symons (2013; redeveloped 2020), https://theriddleages.com.

If you’re citing a particular post, you should add in more specific details, e.g.:

You can find the author’s name and date for each post under the title. Authors who are guest contributors will be introduced at the top of each post, so make sure you check that the post name matches up with the actual author by reading the post itself.

Creative Commons License:

Translations and Commentary are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.