Introduction

Abstract

How many things, Files, doorsills, atlases, wine glasses, nails, Serve us like slaves who never say a word, Blind and so mysteriously reserved.(Jorge Luis Borges, 'Things') 1Naefre hio heofonum hran, ne to helle mot, ac hio sceal wideferh wuldorcyninges larum lifgan. Long is to secganne hu hyre ealdorgesceaft aefter gongeð, woh wyrda gesceapu; þaet is wraetlic þing to gesecganne.[It never reaches heaven, nor to hell, but it must always live within the king of glory's laws. Long it is to say how its life-shape spins on afterwards, the twisted pattern of fate; that is a wondrous thing to speak.] (Exeter Book Riddle 39) 2 Anglo-Saxon things and theoryThings could talk in Anglo-Saxon literature and material culture. Many of these Anglo-Saxon things are still with us today and are still talkative. Nonhuman voices leap out from the Exeter Book riddles, telling us where they came from, how they were made, how they do or do not act. In The Husband's Message, runic letters are borne and a first-person speech is delivered by some kind of wooden artefact. Readers of The Dream of the Rood in the Vercelli Book will come across a tree possessing the voice of a dreaming human in order to talk about its own history as a gallows and a rood. In Andreas, in the same manuscript, we read about stone angels, emerging from the wall into which they have been carved, speaking and walking and raising the dead. Beyond the manuscript