Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Exeter Book contains the only extant collection of Old English riddles. Behind this solitary witness, however, there lies a lost tradition of vernacular riddles, the nature of which can be inferred from a study of its relation to the Latin tradition of aenigmata. For unlike the Old English riddles, Latin aenigmata survive in numerous collections, both anonymous and by identified authors. The main contention of this dissertation is that the Old English poetic genre as represented by the Exeter Book Riddles can be best understood in the context of the composition, development, and transmission of Latin aenigmata. There were two reasons, I contend, for the popularity and rhetorical development of verse aenigmata in England: the first was because the genre had emerged to teach the composition of Latin poetry; and the second because the riddle itself is an inherently competitive, participatory form of verbal expression. These two aspects of the Latin genre led to a series of Anglo-Saxon poets composing aenigmata, many of which were rhetorically ornate poems. These aenigmata inspired the poetic form of Old English riddles and are the best evidence for their development and transmission in Anglo-Saxon England. Unlike previous studies, this dissertation goes beyond the authors of aenigmata to consider through close examination of individual manuscripts the contributions of the scribes and glossators who transmitted their collections from the seventh to the eleventh century. For they were active participants in this competitive literary tradition, even adding their own riddles to the collections that they copied. This is the first study to consider each manuscript as a separate witness to the Latin tradition. It is my contention that the Exeter Book Riddles similarly emerged out of such a collaborative tradition in Old English. The two aspects of the Latin aenigmata—teaching versification and the participatory nature of the riddle—were inherited by Old English poets and scribes, who composed rhetorically ornate riddles and participated in a competitive riddle tradition like their Latin counterparts. Studied in this way, the Exeter Book reveals the traces of what was once a dynamic poetic tradition of Old English riddles.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".