Emotional Anthologies: The Exeter Riddles and the Psalms

The Old English riddles run the gamut in terms of emotional and rhetorical range, constituting a kind of micro-anthology within the wider anthology of the Exeter Book. They explore an assortment of stances, including not only of lament and celebration, but humiliation, anger, triumph, fear, and more. In doing so, they may channel the Psalms, as the emotional anthology which most dominated early medieval English culture. In his Expositio Psalmorum, Cassiodorus analysed the rhetoric of the Psalms in strongly emotional terms, and this chapter experiments with approaching the Riddles with an eye to his definitions of demonstrative, judicial, and deliberative oratory, each associated with different emotional dynamics. It closes with reflections on how Riddle 1 introduces the Exeter collection, contemplating how this text hints at the emotionally generative capacities of literature, as well as how it stages the tensions created by imbuing nonhuman speakers with psalmic voices. In playing with such a powerful literary model and set of emotional scripts, the Riddles foreground the ways in which literature can create new and surprising forms for emotional experience.