Enigma, Audience, Locale: The Ruin as Riddle

In an earlier essay, I observed that the Old English poem known as the Ruin belongs with the adjacent riddles in Exeter, Cathedral Library, MS 3501 ("Exeter Book") according to its manuscript presentation and opening style, and in view of the Anglo-Latin vogue for sets of one hundred riddles. 1 I pointed to nuances of mise-en-page and poetic address. In the case of the Ruin, the scribe has laid out the text to begin with a two-line initial. Any closing punctuation is obscured by the physical damage to fol. 124. A blank line separates the text of the Ruin from Riddle 61 and leaves breathing room for the latter poem's two-line initial O. Contrast the seven-line initial and double-height capitals used in the first manuscript line of Widsith (fol. 84v), admittedly an exceptionally emphatic poem-opening. The Ruin begins in medias res—"Wrætlic is þes wealstan— | wyrde gebræcon, / burgstede burston" (Wondrous is this wall's foundation—wyrd has broken / and shattered this city, ll. 1–2a) —without one of the formalized poetic prologues quasi-obligatory in longer and more self-sufficient Old English poems. 2 In terms of mise-en-page and style, the text of the Ruin bears a closer resemblance to sections of a long poem in the Exeter Book, or to the individual constitutents of the poetic sequence that includes those poems now titled Riddles, than it does to a standalone long poem like Andreas. This conclusion implies the need for a reassessment of the raison d'être of the Ruin, starting again with the obvious outstanding questions concerning its ekphrastic representation of a ruined city with hot springs. The Ruin has received a steady stream of critical comment emphasizing questions of genre and reference. To what extent does the postmedieval, Greek-derived label elegy fit the poem and connect it with the Wanderer and Seafarer? 3 And what locale does the Ruin represent? Once upon a time, Old English specialists agreed that the poem referred to a specific ruin in early Britain and were pretty sure which one was meant, namely, the ruins at Bath (Roman Aquae Sulis). 4 The poem, after all, makes multiple mentions of hot springs (Ruin ll. 38–46). The spring water in the poem is "hat on hreþre" (hot in its core, v. 41a), naturally hot, seemingly ruling out ancient Roman sites in Britain with human-made hypocausts. The point is debatable. Other details have been held to point to Bath as well, particularly the "hringmere" (circular pool, v. 45a) mentioned in a fragmentary line. However, this accumulated evidence falls short of a closed case. In the middle of the twentieth century, most editors and scholars began to argue that the riddle of place had no answer, that "the poet may well have had no particular city in mind. "5 As with many other questions in Old English studies, the old tower of consensus has been toppled, while no new edifice has been raised. We are left with uncertainty and indeterminacy, a pile of old stones to pick through. 6The question of place tantalizes because this is not a case where indeterminacy is a comfortable state of affairs. The question of external reference concerns a point of historical fact—a geographical fact about a real place, certainly, but also a literary fact about a real poet addressing a real audience. Either a specific place was meant on some level and, in an undamaged version of the text scanned by well-informed contemporary eyes or ears, the reference would have been obvious enough. Or no specific place was meant, and the combination of lifelike details included in the poet's description of the town or city (Ruin vv. 2a, 21a, 28a, 37a, 49b burg (-) ) pertains to the realm of fiction alone. In however mediated a style, the poet either does or does not represent a real-world locale with sufficient exactitude to have elicited a contemporary audience's recognition. If yes, then many latter-day readers of the Ruin have conveniently mistaken our own ignorance for a poet's coyness. If no, then many other readers of the Ruin have been tilting at windmills. Are we therefore trapped, like the Chaucerian dreamer who hesitates before a forbidding gate carrying two mutually contradictory inscriptions, one promising bliss and the other only sorrow (Parliament of Fowls ll. 120–53)? 7In this essay I bring together in a new way the two main topics of interest in scholarship on the Ruin, genre and reference, by triangulating them with a third term they both imply, audience. I have no new evidence to adduce for determining the locale, assuming there is one, referred to in the Ruin. Nor am I invested in protecting the poem from the unmedieval, un-English term elegy. Pragmatically speaking, riddle is at least as plausible a fit for the Ruin. Whatever genre label is preferred, I do not think postmedieval readers of the Ruin have been tilting at windmills. They are responding to something real within the poem. This poem does call for an answer, does invite a determination, but "teasingly, " like a riddle. 8 The poem's "strong illusion of specificity" is, one is led to suspect, not wholly an illusion. 9 The Ruin can be read as a riddle of place, and whether you can arrive at a confident answer has to do with where you yourself are placed, in English geography or in time, when coming across the Ruin. As its scholarly reception illustrates, the Ruin either reveals or conceals. We can no longer be sure of catching its drift. I contend that the poem is prepared for this eventuality. It was expecting us, in a sense. Like all riddles it anticipates a distinction in its projected audience. Imagine a poem calculated to have both effects (revelation and occultation) at once, on different segments of the audience, just as the single gate in Chaucer's dream vision bears two opposite inscriptions. There would be an in-group able to spot enough clues to determine the place meant, and an out-group, evidently including us, who are left in perplexity. In its present ruined textual state, yet also in an inferential complete original form, the Ruin calls for an exercise in enigmatic interpretation. Without declaring an answer to the question of external reference, I nonetheless affirm that there is an answer, and that we can still relish this poem's tricky mode of address to some specific knowledgeable (local? ) community even now that time has worn away the contours of that community and what they knew. By the same token, the Ruin addresses an out-group and expects to baffle them. What I am suggesting is that we are, by extension from the poem's original out-group audience, doomed by circumstance to be insufficient readers of the Ruin. If this feels intolerably unfair, consider the Old English Riddles for which there is no agreed-upon solution among scholars, though we agree that there should be one. 10 It is a little like that. Such a poem necessarily would have slightly different aesthetic and intellectual pleasures for those who do or don't get the reference. The in-group can experience the pleasure of recognition, while the out-group, by no means locked out of all appreciation, contemplates the enigmatic poem as a kind of mysterious ruin, an elusive disclosure. That is precisely how modern scholars have read the Ruin. Because the answer to this poem's riddle is a place, the relationship between the in- and out-groups in this case might be geographically bounded, or more narrowly delimited according to some precise social configuration. Let it be said that this speculation passes well beyond what can be established by a reading of the poem or a contextualization of the manuscript text. But it stands to reason that the poem's referential play corresponded to an intuition about the social landscape surrounding the poet. It is a strategy expected to hit home. If we will always be insufficient readers of the Ruin, one might well ask, then why study it at all? Consider, first, the point just raised, that the poem retains deep resonance and delightful texturality for its out-group readers. All is not lost if the locale is lost. Second, and even more important for this essay, is the realization that insufficiency forms part of the dialectic of enigmatic reading. A sense of having been unequal to the task of reading a poem is one of the most historically durable facets of the experience of reading poetry, premodern to postmodern. Enigmatic interpretation gives us purchase on this cyclical interplay of frustration and intuition. This essay joins recent and less-recent studies that read riddling tendencies in short Old English poems not traditionally categorized as riddles. 11 The so-called elegies, including the Husband's Message, which precedes the Ruin in the Exeter Book, have been especially hospitable to enigmatic reading. I want to underscore that in the case of the Ruin the move to cross-fertilize genre designations responds to more than a general apprehension, true enough as far as it goes, that all early English verse instantiates a "poetics of enigma. "12 The specific mise-en-page and style of the Ruin in the Exeter Book indicate that the compiler grouped this poem conceptually with what we call the Riddles. Until recently it might have been possible to shrug off the juxtaposition of Ruin and Riddles as a compiler's hasty overreading of wrætlic in the opening line of the Ruin, 13 but John D. Niles has shown just how involved, solicitous, and meaningful was the design of this manuscript collection, right down to the grouping and sequencing of its sundry poetic texts. 14 That an early reader/compiler thought of the Husband's Message and Ruin as riddles or riddle-equivalents should not be dismissed out of hand as a "startling" "error" by someone "not reading carefully. "15 We would do well to take seriously the testimony of that interpretive and compilational activity, for it is the activity that, however belated and partial with respect to the poem's author, transmitted to us the only text of the Ruin extant today. Any genre classification raises an obvious problem of coherence. How do we know that a text should usefully be labeled as a specific genre, without referring to an argument that establishes likeness with other texts that have in their turn undergone a parallel interpretive process? That there is strong contemporary support, extrinsic and intrinsic to poetic texts, for the genre enigma/rædels in early Britain mitigates the problem of classification but does not resolve it. The genre is eccentric, apparently distinctive yet difficult to define in terms that do not apply to all poetic language. 16 The riddle is both well-defined and slippery. The question, "Is it a riddle? , " implies the relevance of a special set of interpretive strategies that nevertheless bear a family resemblance to the strategies for interpreting poetry, or literature, in general. For this reason riddle does not pertain to the same plane of being in poetics as its competitors elegy and lyric. 17 These are not three instances of the same kind of genre terminology, both because riddle is an Old English term with a specific armature of expectations around it, while elegy and lyric are not, and because enigmatic style merged into literary style as such in early England much as lyric style merges into poetic style as such for us today, a point to which I will return. Ultimately, I am here less interested in labels than in the phenomenology of literary reading, which entails a separate problematic, having to do with horizon of expectations and utility. 18 If the reader or listener thinks a poem belongs to a particular genre, how does that judgment affect what the poem can and does do, aesthetically, ethically, or politically? The gambit of this essay is that reading the Ruin as (if) a riddle, cued by its manuscript context, teaches us something new about the implications of its imagery. The Ruin does resemble the other so-called Old English elegies to the extent that it begins in the manner of a dramatic monologue. "Wrætlic is þes wealstan. " The verse summons a scene: it is indexical and situated as opposed to being a disembodied descriptio. It is precisely not "a general picture. . . that might apply to any ruin. "19 The word wrætlic is found commonly in the opening lines of the Riddles and may be a tipoff that the poem to come will pose a conundrum. 20 The poem's "formal and exalted diction, " including a concentration of hapax legomena and difficult compound words, may be another sign of riddling. 21 The intermittent use of internal rhyme may be yet another. The specifier þes is the first clue that we are to guess at a particular place, somewhere one could actually stand and point and observe this awe-inspiring wealstan. The poem's opening lines are in the eternal present tense of what we'd now call lyric. Although the Ruin comes to meditate complexly on the texture of time, 22 the initial scene is one of a timeless ruin hypothetically available for the reader's or listener's inspection: "Hrofas sind gehrorene, | hreorge torras, / hrungeat berofen | hrim on lime" (The roofs are ruined, the towers toppled, / frost in the mortar has broken the gate, ll. 3–4). For all its Biblical analogues23 and theological implications, 24 the poem privileges the here and now, the this-worldly spot from which someone could inspect a ruin: this ruin. It takes nothing away from such a powerful reality-effect to accept that the effect is made to point toward an actual place. 25 Perhaps knowing the identity of the author sufficed for the audience or coterie hailed by the Ruin to know the place. But there are other indications of playful concealment. The poeticism "enta geweorc" (the work of giants, v. 2b) is a far more blatant clue than it might appear, for in each of its occurrences in Old English verse enta geweorc evokes Roman material culture. 26 The poet has frontloaded this phrase for a reason. Along with þes, it solicits the special ingenuity associated with riddles. With "Oft þæs wag gebad / ræghar and readfah | rice æfter oþrum" (This wall, rust-stained / and covered with moss, has seen one kingdom after another, Ruin ll. 9b–10), in a fashion made familiar to us by the Romantics, the poet turns a description of ruins presently in view into an excavation of cultural history. Note þæs "this" again here (and v. 30a; cf. vv. 29b, 37a þas). The poem's deictic gestures ground its more exuberant flights of historical imagination, which indeed connect it to the other so-called Old English elegies, in the concretenesses of time and place. These specifiers are analogous to invitations to solve a riddle. Here the poem slips into the past tense, one inscribed within its present-tense lyric scene. At "Worað giet se" (The foundation is still crumbling, v. 12a), whose grammatical subject is missing due to damage, attention snaps back to what is immediately visible, perhaps the foundation as in R. M. Liuzza's translation here. 27 Then, by the end of the damaged passage, it is back to the past: . . . myne swiftne gebrægdhwætred in hringas, hygerof gebondweallwalan wirum wundrum togædre. Beorht wæron burgræced, burnsele monige. (. . . put together a swiftand subtle system of rings; one of great wisdomwondrously bound the braces together with wires. Bright were the buildings, with many bath-houses. ) 28 (ll. 18b–21) The work of observation slips imperceptibly into the work of imagination. The Ruin's poignant oscillation between then and now has camouflaged the riddle of place that it poses. For to appreciate the full weight of the history the poem imagines, you ideally should know the place it describes, which is where that history unfolded. It is probably Bath; it could be Chester; it may be someplace less obvious. 29 The problem is difficult. But in the poet's strategy of siting the past in the present, no less than in sparkling details like the "swiftne. . . / hwætred in hringas, " the hot springs, and the circular pool, one can glean that there was indeed an answer to be had. The reference to the binding of rings is an obvious metaliterary allusion to poetic cunning itself. 30 Read this way, as (if) a riddle, the Ruin does something different with its evocations of ruination than the Wanderer, for example, or the elegiac passages in Beowulf, to which it has usually been compared. From within the general expected reflection on the transience of all worldly things, the poet offers an epiphany about place and emplacement. A reader or listener hooked into the poem's local culture can have the strange and rare experience of watching the glittering pagan past of "secgrofra wera" (the brave swordsmen, v. 26b) and "þæs teaforgeapa. . . / hrostbeages hrof" (the rich vaults of these vermillion roofs, ll. 30–31a) shimmer into the present moment and into the very ruined structure now before their eyes, or their memory. 31 The past suffuses the present. Because it is set long ago, Beowulf cannot match that effect, for the present which the past suffuses in that poem is itself antiqued. The Beowulf poet's characteristic particle is the exoticizing þæt, not the domesticating þes. If the Ruin makes the past present, the Wanderer and Seafarer attempt something like the reverse. In those two poems, the joyful world left behind is still within living memory, while future ruination haunts the yet unmarred material culture of the profligate present: "Ongietan sceal gleaw hæle | hu gæstlic bið / þonne ealre þisse worulde wela | weste stondeð" (The wise man must realize how ghastly it will be / when all the wealth of this world stands waste, Wanderer ll. 73–74) ; "ne mæg þære sawle | þe biþ synna ful / gold to geoce | for godes egsan" (that gold will be useless before the terror of God / for any soul that is full of sin, Seafarer ll. 100–101). The following lines in the Wanderer share so many words with the Ruin that Andy Orchard moots the possibility of direct borrowing, but the effect is quite different in context: 75swa nu missenlice geond þisne middangeardwinde biwaune weallas stondaþ, hrime bihrorene, hyrðge þa ederas. Woniað þa winsalo; waldend licgaðdreame bidrorene, duguþ eal gecrong80wlonc bi wealle. . . . . . 85Yþde swa þisne eardgeard ælda scyppendoþþæt burgwara breahtma leaseeald enta geweorc idlu stodon. Se þonne þisne wealsteal wise geþohte. . . (as now here and there throughout this middle-earthwalls stand blasted by wind, beaten by frost, the buildings crumbling. The wine halls topple, their rulers liedeprived of all joys; the proud old troopsall fell by the wall. . . . . . The Creatorof men thus destroyed this walled city, until the old works of giants stood empty, without the sounds of their former citizens. He who deeply considers, with wise thoughts, this foundation. . . ) 32 (ll. 75–80a; 85–88) Use of swa "just as" and se "someone who, for instance" turns this passage into a fully generalized tableau. Her "here" in the Wanderer (vv. 108a, 108b, 109a, 109b) and Seafarer (v. 102b) means "here on earth, in this fleshly existence, " as opposed to in heaven, whereas þær "there, the place where" in the Ruin (vv. 32b, 40b, 46b) means, by implication, "here, in the place where I am standing, " as opposed to where the audience might be located at a given moment of reading or listening. 33 So too, in the Wanderer and Seafarer, þas/þe (o) s/þis (-) "this" (Wanderer vv. 58b, 62b, 74a, 75b, 85a, 89a, 110a; Seafarer vv. 65b, 86a, 87b) points in a highly generalized and conventionalized manner to the whole of sublunary existence. 34 In the Ruin, as we have seen, þas/þæs/þes sounds like it points to some certain place. The distinction between the use of deictics in the Ruin and in the Wanderer and Seafarer is not absolute—the images of ruins in all three poems are at once particularized and generalized—but the Ruin stands apart for laying comparatively much greater emphasis on the situatedness and singularity of the ruined architecture it describes. "Þa baþu" (the baths, Ruin vv. 40b, 46b) are not so much introduced as a narrative element as they are indicated as preexisting the poem—presumably because they do preexist it, somewhere in the insular topography known to the poet. The article þa may call back faintly to the first mention of baths, v. 21b burnsele, but it is another advertisement that, if I can put it like this, Reality has entered the poem to provide it with its "central exemplar of the city's splendor. "35 The allusion to something outside the poem comes overmarked as such. By its overdetermination of reference, the Ruin cannily prepares for misreaders, those not in the know, who are displaced in time or space from the real-world inspiration for its musings. The poem expresses a surprisingly early if oblique self-consciousness about the mediation of reality by literary discourse. The pointedness of the Ruin's representation of place crescendoes in the ending. It is remarkable how repetitive the description of the baths is, despite the loss of text due to damage: Stanhofu stodan, stream hate wearpwidan wylme; weal eall befeng40beorhtan bosme, þær þa baþu wæron, hat on hreþre. Þæt wæs hyðelic þing. Leton þonne geotan. . . ofer harne stan hate streamasun. . . . . . 45oþ þæt hringmere hate. . . . . . þær þa baþu wæron. Þonne is. . . . . . . . . re. Þæt is cynelic þing—hu se. . . . . . burg. . . . (Stone buildings stood, the wide-flowing streamthrew off its heat; a wall held it allin its bright bosom where the baths were, hot in its core, a great convenience. They let them gush forth. . . the hot streams over the great stones, under. . . until the circular pool. . . hot. . . . . . where the baths were. Then. . . . . . that is a noble thing, How. . . the city. . . ) 36 (ll. 38–49) Words, images, and whole verses recur in a mere twelve lines: stream hate wearp beside hat on hreþre and hate streamas (twice, if streamas is the missing word in v. 45b, an attractive conjecture in context with some paleographical support37) ; þær þa baþu wæron; Þæt wæs positive adj. þing. This is more advertisement: Reality herein. Here it is again, in case you missed it the first few times. Like a riddle, the poem depicts an "abundant reality. "38The foregoing reading posits in the Ruin qualities associated with riddles: deixis; instability; polysemy; referential play; and intepretational openness, paradoxically deployed in the context of a teleological structure that invites a solution. Some of these qualities are compatible with the usual categorization of the poem as elegy; other aspects are less consonant with that categorization. Coming across a riddle, or coming across the Ruin, makes us feel like "accidental eavesdroppers on a discussion that is already underway, between unknown numbers of unseen persons. "39Referential play in enigmatic texts is not free play; it tends toward a purpose. One purpose is to exploit the knowledge the audience brings to the poem. The Old English Riddles show a huge range of generality and specificity in their solutions, from "soul and body" and "storm" at one extreme to "Lot and his offspring, " "one-eyed garlic seller, " and "Ursa Major" at the other. 40 The name of a place in early Britain, though not actually attested as a riddle solution, fits comfortably within this range. 41 The spectrum of categories of thing put in play by riddles corroborates the playful address to a mixed audience that I posit for the Ruin. Old English riddlers, constructing texts that invited guesses, themselves had to guess about their future audiences. I suggest the author of the Ruin played this game. Even "unknown numbers of unseen persons" must possess some covert social reality. The social function of early English literature is rarely self-evident or even recoverable, and that is particularly true of riddles. A literary-historical uniformitarianism would hold that all literature subserves a historically suitable array of social functions. Reemphasizing the enigmatic overtones of the Ruin does not uncover its social function, but it does clarify the complexity of that function, which I would relate to a mixed audience of insiders and outsiders. Niles has deconstructed the hall/cloister and clean/obscene binaries in interpreting the Exeter Book. 42 Arguments against overly strict cultural polarities open up interesting new possibilities for the constituency of insiders and outsiders for a poem like the Ruin. The dividing line need not have fallen where we would now retrospectively draw it in building our convenient generalizations about early insular culture. The Ruin illustrates "the role that medieval people played in the preparation of their own future receptions. "43 Because the play of reference in the Ruin accounts for the possibility of misapprehension, the conflict in scholarship between guesses and inconclusions is not wholly of our own making. The poem poses its reference to a place somewhere between citation and inspiration. Readers who conclude that the ruined city is a fiction are responding to the poet's referential discretion. Readers who instead search for a corresponding ruin in Britain are responding, differently, to the same discretion. Reading the Ruin as (if) a riddle absorbs these two opposed responses into a higher interplay between recognition of the particular disclosure and acceptance of the general truth. The images of a riddle are simultaneously generic and specific, metaphorical and literal, according as it is read before or after the flash of insight that supplies the solution. The two aspects can even blend into one another anachronistically during the reading experience, such that the metaphors linger beyond the insight that ostensibly nullifies them, while expectation of a coming epiphany illumines the riddle's generalities with light borrowed from a future realization. Some metaphors might linger because the solution never literalizes them. Patrick J. Murphy has emphasized how the metaphorical domains activated by riddles, which he terms the riddle's "focus, " are always smudging the picture of the solution to some extent. 44 Realization of the solution does not, like a key to an allegory or a roman à clef, reduce the poem to a declaration. If so, the constellation of details in the Ruin that can be construed as clues to the riddle of place is itself an open question. Like a riddler, the poet of the Ruin asks the audience to make a series of inferences and expects only some to manage it. If it has felt easier to locate the general truth in the Ruin than the particular disclosure, that is in part because the title has tipped the scales. Starting with Benjamin Thorpe's edition of 1842, the poem has carried the editorial title The Ruin. 45 A minimalist title is convenient, particularly now that there is no critical consensus which ruin is meant. But it frames the text as a more disengaged and distant poem than is warranted by an alert reading of it. Although coined in the nineteenth century, the barebones title flatters certain mid-twentieth-century scholarly expectations about history-independent textual artifacts (on which more soon). A title more in keeping with the poem's particularizing style would be On the Ruins at _____, where the blank represents the indeterminate place, or at least On a Ruin. Like other Old English poems, the Ruin has weathered the vicissitudes of critical climes. The new criticism made it standard operating procedure in scholarship and in the classroom to posit a speaker who voices the lyric poem. 46 The speaker is equivalent to the narrator of prose fiction, and both are to be carefully distinguished in tone and opinion from the author. The speaker was one of the strategies of containment the new critics employed in order to cordon off the poem, like museum guards, from angles of approach they deemed untoward. In the nature of things, the presumption that lyric poems are voiced by a sustained subjectivity works better for some poems than for others. 47 It does not work for the Ruin, which never uses first-person pronouns nor expresses any self-revealing opinion about its matter. The closest the Ruin comes to an opinion is the detail that the ancient warriors were "wlonc ond wingal" (proud, full of wine, v. 34a). Wlonc is morally ambiguous taken by itself, but Liuzza's translation suppresses the negative cast of wingal. The whole phrase has to mean, "arrogant and wanton in their cups. " It is derogatory, as when the same words form a derogatory verse in the Seafarer (v. 29a), which Liuzza handles better, "proud and puffed up with wine. " However, this censure made in passing in the Ruin does not reveal a self, for it does little more than affirm Christian orthodoxy on paganism and gluttony. Palpable strain attends James F. Doubleday's and Helena Znojemská's readings of the Ruin in terms of a speaker. 48 It is unsurprising that Kathryn Hume could not discern how "the speaker" felt about the ruin, for the poem, unlike all the other Old English poems categorized as elegies, never constructs a speaker to begin with. 49 "In effect, " Alain Renoir has written, "it has a speaking voice but no speaker. . . the emotional frame of reference is a total vacuum. "50 Tellingly, one of the twentieth-century critics who (with Renoir) best discerned the speakerlessness of the Ruin was Anne Thompson Lee, because she read it not as any kind of elegy but as an encomium urbis or praise of a city. Lee's assessment is blunt: the first part of the poem could hardly be called an elegy, or even a lament. For there is no one who actively laments. The poet creates images which may awaken feelings of sadness in the reader, and may even have aroused similar feelings in himself, but this is all inference. We are not told, "this is sad". Instead we are given a picture and left to judge for ourselves. 51The Ruin thus prophetically rebukes the weakness for consolidated subjectivity in English literary criticism as it has evolved since the eighteenth century. Even though the uptake of new critical reading practices in Old English