Page:Anglo-Saxon Riddles of the Exeter Book (1963).djvu/47



Over the hillsides this air upholds bright little creatures, swarthy and dark-clad; bold of song, they fare in flocks and loudly chirp. They tread the headlands, sometimes men&rsquo;s houses. They name themselves.

Tupper calls this a &ldquo;little swallow-flight of song,&rdquo; and gives Swallows as the answer; Trautmann (finally) and Mackie agree. Another guess is Gnats or Midges. The last words are ambiguous: either, as above, they have an onomatopoeic name, or &ldquo;name them yourselves.&rdquo; The former supports Mrs. von Erhardt-Siebold&rsquo;s argument for Jackdaw, in PMLA  (1947), 1–8. The jackdaw belongs to the large family of corvidae and is relatively small (13–14 inches); its &ldquo;song&rdquo; caw is certainly descriptive, but the bird itself is hardly as small as the riddle implies. Wyatt meets various guesses with a proper sense of humor. To Trautmann&rsquo;s objection that swallows do not tread and gnats do not chirp loudly, he holds that &ldquo;tread&rdquo; is not to be taken too literally. &ldquo;And, as applied to Gnats or Midges, I find it a perfectly delightful word for their up and down motion in the summer air.&rdquo; Whether they are loud &ldquo;depends entirely on the distance from your ear. At his own selected distance&hellip;.&rdquo; Still, swallow fits the text better.

In those first days my father and mother left me for dead: there was no life yet, no life within me. Then a kindly kinswoman faithfully covered me with her own clothing, held me and cherished, kept me warmly, even as gently as her own children&mdash; until beneath her, as my destiny willed,