Now, in a way, the field has returned to something like Woody's earliest attempts at unriddling the human face, when he used a variation on the n-tuple method to find patterns of similarity in a giant field of data points.
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Reading the riddle as 'Ice', Murphy argues that 'the solution snaps the text into sudden focus and reveals the great wonder of a commonplace thing'.Patrick J. Murphy, Unriddling the Exeter Riddles (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), p. 7.
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Patrick J. Murphy, Unriddling the Exeter Riddles (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), p. 4. The manuscript was written c. 800 in the Carolingian scriptorium of Lorsch Abbey, where it was rediscovered in 1753. It contains among a variety of grammatical texts the Aenigmata of Symphosius, the Enigmata of Aldhelm and a variety of prose and metrical texts by Boniface.
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Interpretation has focused on whether the riddle alludes to biblical figures, prominently Tubal-cain,Patrick J. Murphy, Unriddling the Exeter Riddles (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), pp. 139-51. though allusions to fallen angels have also been envisaged.Thomas Klein, 'The Metaphorical Cloak of Exeter Riddle 83, "Ore/Gold/Metal" ', ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, 28:1 (2015), 11-14, DOI: 10.1080/0895769X.2015.1035366.
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Critical discussion has focused on the genre of the poem.Principally Joseph B. Trahern, 'The Ioca Monachorum and the Old English Paraoh’, English Language Notes, 7 (1970-71), 165-68. It is preserved in a collection which also contains the Exeter Book Riddles, but is not technically a riddle in form, but rather a dialogic question about arcane wisdom, and is not traditionally counted among the riddles themselves.Patrick J. Murphy, Unriddling the Exeter Riddles (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), pp. 34-36.
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Exeter Book Riddle 69 (according to the numbering of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records)George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie (eds), The Exeter Book, The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936). is one of the Old English riddles found in the later tenth-century Exeter Book. Its interpretation has occasioned a range of scholarly investigations, but clearly has something to do with ice and is likely indeed to have the solution 'ice'.Patrick J. Murphy, Unriddling the Exeter Riddles (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), pp. 7-9.
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Exeter Book Riddle 60 (according to the numbering of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records)George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie (eds), The Exeter Book, The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936). is one of the Old English riddles found in the later tenth-century Exeter Book. The riddle is usually solved as 'reed pen', although such pens were not in use in Anglo-Saxon times, rather being Roman technology; but it can also be understood as 'reed pipe'.Patrick J. Murphy, Unriddling the Exeter Riddles (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), pp.
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In the case of ancient riddles recorded without solutions, considerable scholarly energy also goes into proposing and debating solutions.E.g. Patrick J. Murphy, Unriddling the Exteter Riddles (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011). Whereas previously researchers had tended to take riddles out of their social performance contexts, the rise of anthropology in the post-War period encouraged more researchers to study the social role of riddles and riddling.E.g. David Evans, "Riddling and the Structure of Context", The Journal of American Folklore, 89 (1976), 166–88; ; ; Annikki Kaivola- Bregenhøj, Riddles: Perspectives on the Use, Function, and Change in a Folklore Genre, Studia Fennica, Folkloristica, 10 (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2001), .
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