ABOUT EUSEBIUS'S RIDDLES

Sometime in the eighth century, a man known as Eusebius composed sixty riddles in Latin verse. Eusebius may or may not have been (scholars disagree) the Latinate name used by one “Hwætberht.” Hwætberht was abbot of Wearmouth-Jarrow for over twenty years and the contemporary of the Venerable Bede (who links him to the name Eusebius). Identifying Eusebius as Hwætberht would localise and lend an air of definite authority to this otherwise all-but-anonymous riddle collection.

Eusebius’ riddles tackle all the “typical” subjects you might come to expect after spending a certain amount of time with medieval riddle collections: there’s a smattering of the religious, the cosmic, the alphabet, and so on. What is more pronounced with Eusebius than with some other riddlers is his evident fondness not just for the natural world but for animals in particular. Reading the last third or so of the collection feels like browsing a bestiary: here you’ll find tigers, dragons, two-headed snakes, electric eels, among other critters! Eusebius’ enjoyment at describing these creatures, sometimes badly (or at least unrecognisably, from a modern point of view), is obvious.    

Eusebius’ sixty riddles survive in two manuscripts compiled roughly three hundred years after his death: London, British Library, Royal MS 12 C XXIII (digitised online here) and Cambridge, University Library, Gg.v.35 (digitised online here). As with other Latin riddles, these manuscripts give the riddles’ solutions in their titles. In both manuscripts, Eusebius’ sixty riddles join Tatwine’s forty, which suggests that Eusebius composed his riddles to bring Tatwine’s set up to the full, Symphosian-Aldhelmian set of one hundred—or, at least, that that was how Eusebius’ riddles were received.

The following edition and translation of Eusebius’s Latin riddles, based on both surviving manuscript witnesses, are by Alexandra Reider.

Editions

  • Glorie, Fr., ed. Variae collectiones aenigmatum Merovingicae aetatis. Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 133. Turnhout: Brepols, 1968, pages 209-71 (with English translation by Erika von Erhardt-Siebold). Available online here.
  • Orchard, Andy, ed. and trans. The Old English and Anglo-Latin Riddle Tradition. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021, pages 140-81; and A Commentary on The Old English and Anglo-Latin Riddle Tradition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021, pages 172-229.
  • Williams, Mary, ed. & trans., 'The Riddles of Tatwine and Eusebius'. PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 1974. Pages 157-249.

Studies of Eusebius’s Riddles

  • Lockett, Leslie. Anglo-Saxon Psychologies in the Vernacular and Latin Traditions. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. Especially chapter 5.
  • Mogford, Neville. “The Moon and the Stars in the Bern and Eusebius Riddles.” In Riddles at Work in the Early Medieval Tradition: Words, Ideas, Interactions. Edited by Megan Cavell and Jennifer Neville. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020, pages 230-46.
  • Salvador-Bello, Mercedes. “Clean and Unclean Animals: Isidore’s Book XII from the Etymologiae and the Structure of Eusebius’s Zoological Riddles.” English Studies, vol. 93, issue 5 (2012), pages 572-82.
  • Salvador-Bello, Mercedes. Isidorean Perceptions of Order: The Exeter Book Riddles and Medieval Latin Enigmata. Morgantown, West Virginia University Press, 2015. Especially chapters 1, 2 and 3.4
  • Salvador-Bello, Mercedes. “The Nursemaid, the Mother, and the Prostitute: Tracing an Insular Riddle Topos on Both Sides of the English Channel.” In Riddles at Work in the Early Medieval Tradition: Words, Ideas, Interactions. Edited by Megan Cavell and Jennifer Neville. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020, pages 215-29.
  • Thornbury, Emily V. Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Especially chapter 2.

And referred to throughout:

  • Bitterli, Dieter. Say What I am Called The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book and the Anglo-Latin Riddle Tradition. Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2009.
  • Cavell, Megan and Jennifer Neville, eds. Riddles at Work in the Early Medieval Tradition: Words, Ideas, Interactions. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020.

Digitised Manuscripts

  • London, British Library, Royal MS 12 C XXIII. Available here.
  • Cambridge, University Library, Gg.v.35. Available here.

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