Is this the answer to a 1,000-year-old riddle?
There are 90 riddles in a book that has been kept at Exeter Cathedral since it was written 1,050 years ago. Riddles were popular in Anglo-saxon England and one of those in the Exeter Book still awaits a certain solution – or did until now, when a philologist working in Spain got to grips with it.
The riddle begins: “I know a lordly guest, who is dear to a noble one among human settlements and whom neither harsh hunger nor burning thirst, neither age nor illness, can harm. If the servant who must possess him on the journey serves him honourably, they will find feasting, bliss and countless progeny assigned to them when they are safe at home.”
The riddle specifies that “neither brother wishes to fear the other; that will harm them both when, eager for elsewhere, they both turn away from the embrace of their one kinswoman, their mother and sister.”
Well, what’s all that about? Since the riddle (No 43 in the Exeter Book) was first printed in 1842, the most popular solution has been Mind and Body (or Body and Soul). Who then would be the “one kinswoman”? That would be the Earth, said FE Dietrich, the German philologist, in 1859.
But in a learned article in Devon and Cornwall Notes and Queries (42;2) Dr Andrew Breeze of the University of Navarre challenges this default solution. Why, he asks should the subjects of the riddle suffer when they leave the embrace of their one kinswoman, if she is the Earth, to which the body returns? In any case how is the Earth either mother or sister to the Soul?
He proposes that the guest is the Guardian Angel to the travelling servant, who is the ordinary Christian. Their mother and sister would be Holy Wisdom. Here I must declare a sort of interest.
Two of Dr Breeze’s footnotes refer to books I have published: Prayers for this Life (2005) and Comfort (2004). But he’s not quoting me, for both books were anthologies. The first contains a short traditional rhyming prayer to one’s Guardian Angel: Angel of God, my guardian dear, To whom God’s love commits me here; Ever this day [night] be at my side, To light, to guard, to rule and guide.
This prayer has been attributed to St Anselm, but I learn from Dr Breeze that it encapsulates a stanza from a poem by a contemporary of Anselm called Reginald of Canterbury. Sir Richard Southern, an authority on Anselm, wrote of the strong Anglo-saxon devotion to guardian angels, for which there was warrant in the early Christian texts and the Fathers of the Church.
The reference to the anthology Comfort is to a remarkable spiritual exercise by Lady Lucy Herbert (1699-1744), an Augustinian Canoness in exile at Bruges, who recommends drawing up a contract with one’s guardian angel, promising respect for him “till your last breath”. This citation illustrates the continuity of the devotion to such angels from before the Conquest to modern times. As for the kinswoman, Dr Jennifer Neville of Royal Holloway has suggested in a lecture that it should be the Virgin Mary.
Dr Breeze agrees that Mary is called “Mother and Sister of the Son [Jesus]”, but says that the riddle refers to Wisdom, for the book of Proverbs declares: “Say unto Wisdom, Thou art my sister; and call understanding thy kinswoman.” The Bible gives Wisdom a conventional feminine gender.
Dr Neville was the first seriously to challenge the solution of Body and Soul to Riddle 43. I hope she will have more to say on this puzzler in her forthcoming study called Truth Is Trickiest. So, after 1,000 years, it still proves.