Exeter Book Riddle 30

rdf:langString Exeter Book Riddle 30

rdf:langString Exeter Book Riddle 30 (according to the numbering of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records) is one of the Old English riddles found in the later tenth-century Exeter Book. Since the suggestion of F. A. Blackburn in 1901, its solution has been agreed to be the Old English word bēam, understood both in its primary sense 'tree' but also in its secondary sense 'cross'. The riddle is particularly important because it actually appears twice in the Exeter Book, on folios 108r (numbered 30a in the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records) and 122v (numbered 30b). Parts of 30b are missing due to burn damage to the manuscript. This makes Riddle 30 a rare example of an Old English poem surviving in two copies (in this case both by the same scribe). The copies are fairly different, and these differences seem more likely to have arisen from scribal rather than memorial transmission. In the assessment of Roy M. Liuzza, '30b is rhetorically a decidedly more forceful poem than 30a'.