What am I? A: Hyphen. The first two lines yield high-fen. A hyphen is used by a writer to tie (or cramp) two words together. Book riddles leave a lasting impression while reading. They make everyone laugh and scratch their head. Sometimes they are easy as pie, and other times they might find you scratching your head. So get ready to embark on a reading adventure as you try and solve these fun book riddles. You need to divide a round birthday cake into eight pieces, so each of your guests will have something to eat. How can you do this by making only three straight cuts with a knife, and without moving any of the pieces? Who am I?’ This question lurks in all stories, poems, speeches that use the first person, the ‘I’ voice: from a Shakespeare soliloquy, to a Victorian novel, to a contemporary poem. One of the texts below directly asks ‘Say what I’m called’, but all probe these questions of identity, and of how we relate to the voices and things around us.

a b c d e f g h i j k l Shippey, Tom (2017). The Complete Old English Poems. Translated by Williamson, Craig. University of Pennsylvania Press. pp. x-xi, 299-302. ISBN 978-0-8122-9321-0. Paull F. Baum, Anglo-Saxon Riddles of the Exeter Book (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1963), https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_Riddles_of_the_Exeter_Book While the Exeter Book was found in a cathedral library, and while it is clear that religious scribes worked on the riddles, not all of the riddles in the book are religiously themed. Many of the answers to the riddles are everyday, common objects. There are also many double entendres, which can lead to an answer that is obscene. One example of this is Riddle 23/25:Craig Williamson (ed), The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977) Four of the riddles originate as translations from the Latin riddles of Aldhelm, emphasising that the Exeter Book riddles were at least partly influenced by Latin riddling in early medieval England: riddles 35 (mailcoat, also found in an eighth-century version in a ninth-century manuscript), and 40, 66, and 94 (all derived from Aldhelm's hundredth riddle, De creatura). [4] [5] Anglo-Saxon Riddles of the Exeter Book, trans. by Paull F. Baum (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1963), https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_Riddles_of_the_Exeter_Book; George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie (eds), The Exeter Book, The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936). Bernard J. Muir (ed), The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry: An Edition of Exeter Dean and Chapter MS 3501, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000)

The poems give a sense of the intellectual sophistication of Anglo-Saxon literary culture. They include numerous saints’ lives, gnomic verses, and wisdom poems, in addition to almost a hundred riddles, numerous smaller heroic poems, and a quantity of elegiac verse. The moving elegies and enigmatic riddles are the most famous of the Exeter Book texts. [11] The elegies primarily explore the themes of alienation, loss, the passage of time, desolation, and death, and deal with subjects including the sorrows of exile, the ruination of the past, and the long separation of lovers. Through them we encounter lonely seafarers, banished wanderers, and mournful lovers. [6] [11] The riddles, by contrast, explore the fabric of the world through the prism of the everyday. (See the sections on 'Riddles' and 'Elegies' below.) The Exeter manuscript is also important because it contains two poems signed by the poet Cynewulf, who is one of only twelve Old English poets known to us by name. [11] Matto, Michael; Delanty, Greg (2011). The Word Exchange. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. ISBN 978-0393342413. Anthology of Old English poetry, featuring many of the texts from the Exeter Book. The Exeter Book, also known as the Codex Exoniensis or Exeter Cathedral Library MS 3501, is a large codex of Old English poetry, believed to have been produced in the late tenth century AD. [1] It is one of the four major manuscripts of Old English poetry, along with the Vercelli Book in Vercelli, Italy, the Nowell Codex in the British Library, and the Junius manuscript in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. The book was donated to what is now the Exeter Cathedral library by Leofric, [2] the first bishop of Exeter, in 1072. It is believed originally to have contained 130 [3] or 131 leaves, of which the first 7 [3] or 8 have been replaced with other leaves; the original first 8 leaves are lost. [ citation needed] The Exeter Book is the largest and perhaps oldest [3] [4] known manuscript of Old English literature, [2] [5] [6] [7] containing about a sixth of the Old English poetry that has survived. [2] [8]

The Exeter Book riddles are varied in theme, but they are all used to engage and challenge the readers mentally. By representing the familiar, material world from an oblique angle, many not only draw on but also complicate or challenge social norms such as martial masculinity, patriarchal attitudes to women, lords' dominance over their servants, and humans' over animals. [14] Thirteen, for example, have as their solution an implement, which speaks of itself through the riddle as a servant to its lord; but these sometimes also suggest the power of the servant to define the master. [15] You have an opportunity to buy a hen. In fact, you have been offered a choice between two quite remarkable animals. One of the hens produces six dozen dozen eggs per month, and the other produces a half dozen dozen. Five men are going to church. It starts to rain, and four of the men begin to run. When they arrive at the church, the four men who ran are soaking wet, whereas the fifth man, who didn’t run, is completely dry. How is this possible?