Moððe word fræt--
"A moth ate words" or "A bug devoured songs."
"Moððe" may be singular or plural. "Fræt" comes from fretan, to devour or eat. The sense of "word" in Old English is often more oral than it is in Modern English.
me þæt þuhte "To me that seemed." þuhte comes from þyncan, to seem or appear.
wrætlicu wyrd "A wonderful or miraculous event." Wrætlic means literally "like a jewel." Wyrd can mean anything from "something that happens" to "destiny, fate." It may also be a pun on wyrde, "speech."
þa ic þæt wundor gefrægn "when I that wonder heard (or learned) about." ,
þæt se wyrm forswealg "that the bug (or worm) swallowed (or devoured)." The prefix "for" often implies intensity and destruction. "Forswelgan" can mean, "swallow up, devour, consume, absorb." "Wyrm" can mean "bug, worm, snake, dragon"--anything from a mosquito to Grendel.
wera gied sumes "the word (speech or song) or a certain man (literally "of a certain one of men"). ,
þeof in þystro, "a thief in darkness (or gloom)"
þrymfæstne cwide "a mighty (or glorious) saying (speech, sentence, proverb, discourse)." "Cwide" is probably an ironic pun on "cwidu," which means "cud, what is chewed." "þrymfæstne" means "glory-fast, glory-bound." A þrymm is a troop or multitude or the power or glory associated with it. Thus the phrase here might mean something like "the tribe-glory story-wisdom." It is difficult to translate.
ond þæs strangan staþol "and the strong foundation" or "the foundation of the strong (man or tribe)." "Staþol" means "base" or "foundation", also "strength" or "support" more generally. .
Stælgiest ne wæs
"That thief-guest was not..." The oxymoron is difficult to translate into modern terms. Keep in mind that trust was a strong prerequisite to sitting down to dinner with someone in A.S. England
(sitting down with stangers or enemies was dangerous) and also that people who stole were often put to death.
wihte þy gleawra "any the wiser (or more skilled)"
þe he þam wordum swealg
"for having swallowed words," literally, "for this (that) he swallowed the words." The verb swelgan takes a dative object instead of an accusative object. It can mean "swallow, incorporate, absorb, imbibe,
devour." It's a range of meanings still available in
modern English as we can say, "Swallow your food" or "Don't swallow that old line!"
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A moth ate songs--wolfed words!
That seemed a weird dish--that a worm
Should swallow, dumb thief in the dark,
The songs of a man, his chants of glory,
Their place of strength. That thief-guest
Was no wiser for having swallowed words.
This is a riddle from the 1000 year old Exeter Book manuscript in Exeter Cathedral in Devonshire. The thief who swallows songs is a bookworm. The riddler pokes fun at the pedantic worm, transformed into word-wolf or midnight marauder, who devours the substance without the spirit.
The medieval moth lays its eggs in a manuscript whose vellum pages are made of cowhide. There are many riddles about books and bookmaking in the Middle Ages. What enclosed the cow, its skin, becomes a path of learning, the page, over which the tailfeather of a bird, the quill, tracks juice from the bark of the hawthorne, the ink. This produces knowledge none of which the bookworm cares about. The moth larvae hatch and eat the pages, devouring the text without understanding.
This riddle may be derived from the 4th or 5th century Latin riddle of Symphosius which reads in translation:
Writing has nourished me, yet I know no letters.
I've lived in books, yet I've learned nothing.
I've devoured the muses, yet I'm unenlightened.
To the Anglo-Saxons--stories, riddles, songs--the wisdom of a people was carried mentally, orally, in the wordhord, the "word-hoard" or "treasure-house of words," the individual and collective memory of the tribe. This word-hoard was invisible but priceless-- and also invincible. You couldn't see it, you couldn't steal it, you couldn't kill it; you could only hear it, remember it, cherish it, and pass it down from generation to generation. The Christian missionaries to England changed all this with their tool of the written word, a word literally made flesh, as a scribe with the quill feather of a bird tracked ink made from the bark of the hawthorne over vellum pages which were cut and cured cowhide. Books were written, songs were transcribed, and the scholar or scribe supplanted the singer. Folks forgot how to shape songs and headed for the library to borrow a book. Unfortunately, in the medieval library the moth was laying its eggs in the spine of the book. The larvae hatched and feasted on the vellum pages. To these worms the Bible and Beowulf were just so much beef jerky. So, as the riddler tells us, the worm ate songs. The Old English "worm" means "moth," "bug," "worm," and also "dragon." It represents everything that bites and annoys you from a mosquito to the monster Grendel, everything that devours you in the grave or in your hour of lost glory. It is finally the force of time and disintegration in the material world. This riddle obviously celebrates the imperishability of oral culture, of tribal song --that place where we keep our "chants of glory." But it also seems to be saying: "Don't be a bookworm. Find something--a riddle, a song, a truth, a formula, an idea--that will transform both you and the world, that will reshape creation and somehow escape or even transcend the ravages of time." There is a weird pun in this riddle--cwide, the wise sayings and songs of the tribe, and cwidu, what is munched, primarily in Anglo-Saxon, the cow's cud. How are oral wisdom and the cud related? It's not just a matter of the distinction between man and animal, or between mind and matter. In the riddle it's a question of transformation. The scribe, like a bookworm, took the poet's song, wrote it down on a cowskin page, promptly forgot it and turned it into the worm's cud. The poet or shaper (as he was called in Anglo-Saxon) turned this moth's munching into a rumination of song, and in so doing reclaimed what was lost in the original wordhoard. The moral may be that it's important to celebrate and shape with your imagination what you see in the world before the worms or the great world dragons begin to treat you like so much delicious text.
For more on the literary play of the Old English "Bookworm" riddle, see Fred C. Robinson, "Artful Ambiguities in the Old English 'Book-Moth' Riddle," in Anglo-Saxon Poetry: Essays in Appreciation for John C. McGalliard, ed. L.E. Nicholson and D. W. Frese, (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1975), pp. 355-62. This is a seminal article on the nature of poetic ambiguity in the riddles, and it has been the starting point in my own thinking about artful language and the spirit of poetic play in this riddle and many others.