Anglo-Saxon Riddles of the Exeter Book/Annotated/63

This is a rather simplified rendering (in a somewhat different meter from the others) of what is known as a world-riddle, found in varying forms in the Orient as in the West. Being interpreted, the sixty men are half-days (days and nights) of a month and the month is December. The four white horses are Sundays and the other seven are the feast days of December (Conception of the Virgin, St. Nicholas, St. Thomas, Christmas, St. Stephen, St. John Evangelist, Holy Innocents). The opposite shore is January, the New Year. There are difficulties in all this, but the main interest is the puzzling situation more or less realistically described. A quite different solution is proposed by L. Blakeley, (R.E.S. n.s. 9 [1958], 241–52), who calls it &ldquo;The Circling Stars,&rdquo; i.e., the constellation of Charles&rsquo;s Wain, eleven of which are visible to the naked eye; sixty is a round number for the surrounding stars.