The Riddles of The Hobbit by Adam Roberts Page A

scholarship—that is, his creative imagination was sparked by debatable points. Thus the cup-stealingepisode in
Beowulf
, which inspired the chapter ‘Inside Information’, is based on a scholarly reconstruction of a badly-damaged section of the manuscript. Similarly the name
Eomer
in
The Lord of the Rings
is borrowed, not from
Beowulf
, but from a scholar’s emendation of the word which actually occurs in the
Beowulf
manuscript. While
The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise
and its riddle-contest are well known among Norse scholars, ‘this particular riddle (“alive without breath”) is found in only one of the three main versions of the saga … Furthermore, the page containing this riddle is lost from the original manuscript.’ 27 It is the very debatableness of riddles that makes them so imaginatively powerful.

    One notion I am setting myself against, here—I may as well be plain—is that any given riddle has one right or correct answer. I take seriously the urge a riddle raises in us to ‘solve’ it, and I do not underestimate the extent to which the going from sifting through possible but unsatisfactory answers to any given riddle to lighting upon an answer that fits, like a key sliding in a lock, is a notable human pleasure. I do not repudiate this pleasure; but neither do I think it a simple thing. The thesis of this study (to repeat myself) is that riddles are, amongst other things, ways of
ironising
the world; and adding an answer to an unsolved riddle does not dissolve away such irony.
    I need to tread carefully here, because I am not talking about
ambiguity
, either in the simple or even in the more complicated Empsonian sense of the word. To read through the
Exeter Book
riddles is to be struck that some of the answers seem obvious where for others the answer is hard to decide. Indeed, many people from specialist scholars to enthusiastic amateurs have proposed sometimes contradictory solutions. But I want to suggest that this contradictoriness is not an index of muddle, or confusion, but of something more radically ironic in the nature of the text itself.
    I am going to look at one more
Exeter Book
riddle, the brief but lovely Riddle 69, by way of thinking what it means to ‘answer’ an Anglo-Saxon riddle. Here it is:
    Wundor wearð on wege: wæter wearð to bane.
    On the way, a wonder: water becomes bone.
    Scholarsagree that answer to this riddle is:
ice
. Scholars do not always agree on the answer to any given riddle. For example, various Old English riddle experts have looked at Riddle 74 (‘I was once a young woman, / a glorious warrior, a grey-haired queen. / I soared with birds, stepped on the earth, / swam in the sea—dived under the waves, languid amongst fishes. I had a living spirit’) and suggested variously
cuttlefish
,
water
,
siren
and
swan
as the answer. By comparison, and remembering that the answers to these riddles are nowhere written down or officially tabulated, ‘on the way, a miracle: water becomes bone …
ice
’ looks relatively straightforward. It is a nicely satisfying and poetic image, too. But here is another answer to the riddle:
    Climbing Cooper’s Hill, and looking back at the curve of the Thames in the bright, cloudy light: the afternoon sun polishing away all grey or blue from the water until it is white, its edges sharpened by the angle of illumination, looking like nothing so much as a mighty rib-bone gleaming, set in the flesh of the land … and I thought to myself
yes, water becomes bone
. 28
    The answer
ice
identifies two points of similarity (hardness, colour) with bone; but this vision of the Thames identifies three (colour, shape, setting). Does that make it a ‘better’ answer to the
Exeter Book
riddle? I suppose there are not many people who would say so. But stop a bit. Here is a third possible answer to the riddle:
    The company said the decision to produce a calcium water had been made after the US Health Department highlighted calcium deficiency as a