A Feast of Creatures: Anglo-Saxon Riddle-Songs

In A Feast of Creatures, Craig Williamson recasts nearly one hundred Old English riddles of the Exeter Book into a modern verse mode that yokes the cadences of Aelfric with the sprung rhythm of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Like the early English riddlers before him, Williamson gives voice to the nightingale, plow, ox, phallic onion, and storm—wind. In lean and taut language he offers us mead disguised as a mighty wrestler, the sword as a celibate thane, the silver wine—cup as a seductress, the hor...