Cathedral some time afterwards. It contains over thirty poems and over ninety verse riddles. They cover a wide range of subjects reflecting the Anglo-Saxon way of life, such as weapons, book-making, animals and everyday objects.
Each riddle presents a topic in a mysterious or puzzling way and asks the reader to identify it. Some are the equivalent of the modern ‘dirty joke’. The riddle whose answer is ‘a key’ begins like this: ‘Something wondrous hangs by a man’s thigh…’ Here’s R. K. Gordon’s translation of one of the cleaner riddles:
I saw a creature in the cities of men who feeds the cattle. It has many teeth. Its beak is useful. It goes pointing downward. It plunders gently and returns home. It searches through the slopes, seeks herbs. Always it finds those which are not firm. It leaves the fair ones fixed by their roots, quietly standing in their station, gleaming brightly, blowing and growing.
The answer is: a rake.
The story of riddle doesn’t end here. By the 14th century it had developed the general sense of a ‘difficult problem’ or ‘mystery’. It came to be applied to people: He’s a complete riddle; I don’t understand him at all! And then, in the 16th century, the noun became a verb, meaning ‘to speak in riddles’. ‘Lysander riddles very prettily,’ says Hermia in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (II.ii.59).
Something very curious then took place. Some people started to use the verb and the noun together. Riddle me a riddle, says one 16th-century writer, meaning ‘Solve this riddle for me’. Others dropped the noun and used the verb twice: Riddle me, riddle me. Evidently people found the sound of the word appealing. And children did too, because eventually the phrase became part of a popular nursery rhyme:
Riddle me, riddle me, ree; A little man in a tree; A stick in his hand, A stone in his throat, If you tell me this riddle I’ll give you a groat. Riddle-me-ree became a frequent title for collections of riddles, and the phrase often appeared in children’s stories. You’ll find it in The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin, by Beatrix Potter.
10. What — an early exclamation (10th century)
Imagine the scene. You are in front of an audience, about to make an announcement or give a speech. Everyone is noisy. Some may have had too much to drink. You need to quieten people down. You’ve no hammer to bang against a table. There’s no spoon to clink against a glass. All you have is your voice. At least you can shout. But what will you say? ‘Ladies and gentlemen…’? ‘Quiet, please…’? ‘Excuse me…’? They all seem a little weak.
The poet-minstrels in Anglo-Saxon mead-halls had the same problem. They were called scops (pronounced ‘shops’), and their role was to tell the heroic stories of the Germanic people to the assembled warriors. The scops must have had prodigious memories. The epic poem Beowulf is 3,182 lines long — that’s about the same length as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet — and, if it was recited in one go, without interruptions, it would have taken a scop well over three hours. But first he had to call the assembly to order. And he did this with a single word, which appears as the opening word of that poem: Hw?t! It is one of the first oral exclamations in English to achieve a literary presence. Nine Old English poems begin with the word.
How was hw?t pronounced? The letter ? was like the short a of modern English cat as spoken by someone from the north of England. The h shows that the w was pronounced with aspiration — a puff of air. Anyone today who makes a distinction in their speech between whales and Wales is using the old hw sound. And if we turn the whole word into modern spelling, it appears as What!
Hw?t certainly packs an auditory punch. Scholars usually translate it as ‘Lo!’, or as a story-telling opener such as ‘Well now’ or ‘So’, but nothing quite captures the short sharp impact of a Hw?t! With its open vowel and high-pitched final consonant, it’s a vocal clap of the hands. We can easily imagine a hall of warriors falling silent, after such an attention-call.
What! continued to have an exclamatory use throughout the Middle Ages, when the word came to be spelled in the modern way and gradually broadened its meaning. It began to express surprise or shock. It could be used to hail or greet someone, in the manner of a modern Hello! And it acted as a summons. In The Tempest (IV.i.33), Prospero uses it to call his spirit- servant to him: ‘What, Ariel! My industrious servant, Ariel!’
We don’t use what as a greeting or summons any more. The closest we get to that is in the phrase What ho!, which lasted well into the 20th century in Britain, and is still sometimes heard. Its fashionable use among the upper classes led to a neat parody by P. G. Wodehouse in My Man Jeeves (1919):
‘What ho!’, I said. ‘What ho!’ said Motty. ‘What ho! What ho!’ ‘What ho! What ho! What ho!’ After that it seemed rather difficult to go on with the conversation.
What! is still used today as an exclamation of surprise or astonishment, often tinged with irritation or anger. We can expand it with an intensifying phrase: What the devil! What the dickens! What on earth! And if our emotion is so great that we’re at a real loss for words, we simply leave the sentence hanging in the air: What in the name of…! What the…!
What, spelled wot, was especially visible as an exclamation in the mid-20th century, during and after the Second World War, when everything was in short supply. All over Europe appeared the drawing of a man with a small round head, a long nose and two hands, peering over the top of a wall. He was called Mr Chad, and he was always complaining about shortages, using such phrases as ‘Wot, no eggs?’ or ‘Wot, no petrol?’ In the USA he was called Kilroy, and a similar cartoon contained the caption ‘Kilroy was here’. In Australia, ‘Foo was here’.
The origin of Chad is uncertain, but it’s likely to derive from the nickname of the cartoonist George Edward Chatterton, who was known to everyone as Chat. The caption became a catch-phrase, and it stayed popular long after wartime shortages disappeared. It’s still with us. In recent months I’ve seen the drawing on a wall where someone was complaining about the lack of a good mobile phone connection. The writing said simply: ‘Wot, no signal?’
3. The name may vary, but the face remains the same — one of the most widely travelled pieces of 20th-century graffiti. Theories abound as to the origins of the names Chad, Foo and Kilroy, with several real-life candidates suggested. The character has been given other names too. In the British army, for example, he was called ‘Private Snoops’. 
11. Bone-house — a word-painting (10th century)
