Unlike most of the Old English poetry preserved in the Exeter Book, the Riddles are secular poems, robustly celebrating the familiar objects and natural world of eighth-century England. Michael Alexander presents a selection of these ingenious and enigmatic poems in versions which capture their peculiar concision, suggestion and vigour of language. Michael Alexander is a poet and the translator of The Earliest English Poems and Beowulf (both Penguin Classics).
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Unlike most of the Old English poetry preserved in the Exeter Book, the Riddles are secular poems, robustly celebrating the familiar objects and natural world of eighth-century England. Michael Alexander presents a selection of these ingenious and enigmatic poems in versions which capture their peculiar concision, suggestion and vigour of language. Michael Alexander is a poet and the translator of The Earliest English Poems and Beowulf (both Penguin Classics).
Read Less