Translating the Nonhuman Across Old and Modern English Verse

Abstract

The rise of ecocriticism and new materialism in early medieval studies has kindled interest in the perspectives of nonhumans in Old English poems, especially the riddles, challenging anthropocentricism by exploring the viewpoint of the natural and material world. Previous scholarship on the Old English riddles of the Exeter Book focused heavily on the search for solutions to texts that do not, for the most part, circulate with answers in their original manuscript context. Many of the nonhuman speakers of the riddles elicit a response of this kind, with their challenges to "Saga hwaet ic hatte" (Say what I am called) or "Frige hwaet ic hatte" (Find out what I am called). The scholarly preoccupation with finding and debating solutions to the Exeter Book riddles remains popular but now coexists with critical approaches, informed by literary theory, which use the riddles to discuss themes such as orality and literacy, identity and ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality, servitude and slavery, and ecology. 1 The last of these themes has emerged as an especially vibrant area of study.Recent scholarship has drawn attention to nonhuman lives in the riddles and has shown that beasts and birds, plants and stones, even tools and weapons, can exert agency, resist human This article was first presented as a conference paper at the Leeds International Medieval Congress, July 2018, in one of the "Riddle Ages" sessions organized by Megan Cavell and Jennifer Neville. I am grateful to the organizers and audience members for their encouragement, feedback and constructive criticism. An extended version of the paper was presented at the Centre for the Study of the Middle Ages seminar series at the University of Birmingham, in October 2018. I would like to thank Daniel Reynolds and his colleagues at Birmingham for the kind invitation and for their helpful questions and comments. I also wish to thank the anonymous reader for JEGP for their generous, insightful suggestions.