The Exeter Book is generally acknowledged to be one of the great works of the English Benedictine revival of the tenth century; the precise dates that it was written and compiled are unknown, although proposed dates range from 960 to 990. This period saw a rise in monastic activity and productivity under the renewed influence of Benedictine principles and standards. At the opening of the period, Dunstan's importance to the Church and to the English kingdom was established, culminating in his appointment to the Archbishopric at Canterbury under Edgar and leading to the monastic reformation by which this era was characterised. Dunstan died in 998, and by the period's close, England under Æthelred faced an increasingly determined Scandinavian incursion, to which it would eventually succumb. The Exeter Book's heritage becomes traceable from 1072, when Leofric, Bishop at Exeter, died. Among the treasures which he is recorded to have bestowed in his Will upon the then-impoverished monastery, is one famously described as "mycel Englisc boc be gehwilcum þingum on leoð-wisan geworht". This book has been widely assumed to be the Exeter Codex as it survives today. Some marginalia were added to the manuscript by Laurence Nowell in the sixteenth century and George Hickes in the seventeenth.
Among the other texts in the Exeter Book, there are over ninety riddles. They are written in the style of Anglo-Saxonpoetry and range in topics from the religious to the mundane. Some of them are double entendres, such as Riddle 25 below. Here are two of these Anglo-Saxon riddles, both in Old English and translated into modern English. The answers to the riddles are included below the text.
Elegies
The Exeter Book contains the Old English poems known as the 'Elegies': The Wanderer ; The Seafarer ; Deor, Wulf and Eadwacer ; The Wife's Lament ; The Husband's Message ; and The Ruin. The term "elegy" can be confusing due to the diverse definitions from different cultures and times. For example, the Oxford English Dictionary states: "In Greek and Latin literature elegiac metre was used for poetry expressing personal sentiments on a range of subjects, including epigrams, laments, sympotic poetry, and love poetry. " In Victorian literature, an elegy is generally a poem written for the dead and although the naming of these poems as 'elegiac' was a Victorian invention, it can be a useful term. As Anne Klinck in her book 'The Old English Elegies' writes: 'genre should be conceived, we think, as a grouping of literary works based, theoretically, upon both outer form and also upon inner form '. In regards to the Exeter Book Elegies, this term can be widened to include "any serious meditative poem. " The poems included in the Exeter book share common themes of longing, loneliness, pain, and the passage of time.
Editions and translations
Included here are facsimiles, editions, and translations that include a significant proportion of texts from the Exeter Book.
Facsimiles
Editions: Old English text only
Editions: Old English text and translation
Anthology of Old English poetry, featuring many of the texts from the Exeter Book.
Editions: Translations only
Anthology of Old English poetry and prose, featuring poems from the Exeter Book.
