Page:Anglo-Saxon Riddles of the Exeter Book (1963).djvu/76

 With him is my home  all my life long. If we two are parted my death is destined.

Fish and River. This is based on Symphosius 12.

Came sixty riding on horseback to the seashore. Eleven rode on stately steeds; four white horses. However they tried they could not cross the water, for it was too deep and the banks too high and the currents too strong. So they climbed on a wagon, with their horses under the pole. Then a horse bore them all, horses and proud men with spears, across the bay and on to the land, though no ox drew it, nor powerful slaves, nor stout steed&mdash;neither swam nor walked on the ground under the strange burden, nor stirred the waters, nor flew in the air, nor turned back. Yet the men crossed the stream and their steeds also, from the high bank. So they strode up on the other side bravely, men and horses, safe and sound from the water.

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