Old English Riddles : From the Exeter Book

Unlike most of the Old English poetry preserved in the Exeter Book, the Riddles are secular poems, robustly celebrating the familiar objects and natural world of eighth-century England.

Michael Alexander presents a selection of these ingenious and enigmatic poems in versions which capture their peculiar concision, suggestion and vigour of language.

Michael Alexander is a poet and the translator of The Earliest English Poems and Beowulf (both Penguin Classics).