2.2.1 Encircled with protective boards: Maintaining the text

§18 In the first category is Ana Algarvio Alves Wong and Dionysus Cho’s work. Of our three examples, Cho’s is the adaptation that most closely follows the original text. He maintains the original wording of the riddle, but uses text effects such as colour, spacing, and movement to visualize the violent acts suffered by the original animal/future book. For example, when the animal is bereft of life, breath, and hair, the words for what it loses gradually vanish from the screen. When the animal’s hide is stretched to turn it into parchment, the words themselves are dragged out. Through these effects, Cho emphasizes not only these losses, but their temporal dimension. Noting “the gradual fading of ‘loss’ items as [they are] slowly stolen,” he deliberately styles that loss to occur not suddenly, but gradually:

The “lost” and “loss” elements I wanted to make permanent—instead of the hover technique we used in class (which is controlled by the user’s cursor), the “loss” is an inevitable action—once the “enemy” begins to take action to “rob” or “steal,” the subsequent targets will fade forever until they become “lost.” This styling draws on the idea of permanence—the transformation that the subject of the riddle takes is gruesome and permanent, but it is part of the process.

In this way, Cho emphasizes loss and its temporality—its occurrence over time; its extension into perpetuity (see Cho’s video, Figure 1). In Cho’s adaptation, the player has a single choice on each screen; exercising that choice reveals more of the riddle’s text. Even though Cho renders the words, “Find out what I am called,” he deliberately provides no input box or other option for the reader to input their answer. The reader/player remains firmly outside the book. In effect, Cho’s transformations allow the poem to write its own creation and transformation, taking the prosopopoeia at the heart of the riddle and giving it digital shape.

Figure 1

Cho’s video.

§19 By contrast, Alves also uses the riddle’s original wording, but reverses its narrative. The game begins with the riddle’s final passage and a hand-drawn image of a closed book. Each passage contains a single clickable word. As the player exercises that single choice, a new passage is revealed—a passage that appears earlier in the original poem. As the player moves backwards through the riddle, the book is unmade: the text grows increasingly transparent and illegible, and the image grows increasingly damaged. In contrast to Cho’s approach, Alves’s adaptation portrays not the making but the unmaking of the book (see Alves’s video, Figure 2). Alves writes:

[T]his riddle and poem, with the creation of a book as its main theme, was turned into a Twine game that showcases the opposite: the death of the written word. This […] was inspired by the poem itself, which shows in the first lines that a natural life is taken to create a new one made of knowledge in a continuous circle of material life. […] The last passage connects with the initial one creating a loop of life, death, and material repurposing in a new medium of knowledge.

Figure 2

Alves’s video.

Alves’s approach invites the reader, in Alves’s words, “to understand the poem’s temporal instability.” The approach is especially powerful given that the Exeter Book, the only manuscript where this poem survives, is itself heavily damaged by its journey through time, rendering some riddles almost illegible or even absent. The placement of damage on Alves’s hand-drawn book recalls the scars of the manuscript. Like Cho, Alves lends digital emphasis to time and loss. She does so by reversing the riddle’s timeline, showing the book growing increasingly damaged, until it is lost altogether into the grey fog of the darkening background.

2.2.2 The hard edge of a knife: Remaking the text

§20 Unlike Alves and Cho, who reproduce the riddle text, Carino and Du change it substantially, re-scripting the riddle as a conversation between first-person narrator and second-person user. Yet the two Twine games have very different emotional atmospheres.

§21 Du’s game opens with a basic social interaction, greeting the user, asking for their name, and giving them a pre-scripted, hyperlinked option to ask for the riddle narrator’s name in return. The tone is casual (“oh hello there”) and friendly (“dear reader,” “what a lovely name”). Conversation continues between the first-person narrator, who claims, “I wasn’t always like this,” and the user, who advances from clue to clue by selecting either hyperlinked riddle words or pre-scripted lines of dialogue. Within this dialogue, the reader’s lines (“I’m listening”; “Oh no!”; “That’s terrifying!”; “*gasp*”) suggest friendliness, even empathy, with the narrator and the narrator’s sufferings (see Du’s video, Figure 3). At the same time as it uses dialogue to emphasize damage and loss, the digital narrative uses visuals to emphasize time. In Du’s words:

The visual changes in the background as well as details that take longer to appear, such as the disappearing line or the water drop splashing on the screen, implore players to sit with the words they are presented.

Figure 3

Du’s video.

Towards the end of the riddle, as the narrator’s predicament transforms from slaughter to splendour, the reader’s dialogue transforms too. The narrative branches. The reader can either remain empathetic and curious (“I am interested in knowing more about your protection”) or become bored and snide (“Farewell, I am uninterested in your drivel”). The snide reader is allowed a chance to apologize and return to the narrative; the committed snide reader is dragged back to friendliness through the promises of the second half of the riddle (“If the children of men wish to enjoy me […] they will have more friends […] their glory and prosperity will increase with favour […]”) and deposited with the empathetic and the apologetic readers at an invitation to guess the object’s identity. The reader invariably receives a “not bad!” comment on their guess, before the riddle object reveals itself as “The Holy Bible.” The friendly stance of Du’s adaptation fulfills the riddle’s promise of a community of friends for the book’s readers: the dialogue depicts a growing friendship between the reader and the book.

§22 Like Du’s, Carino’s game is shaped as a conversation and begins by asking for the player’s name. But unlike Du’s game or the original riddle, Carino changes the narrative’s point of view. The riddle tells the story in first person, from the animal’s point of view; Carino’s game tells the story in the second person, from the human artisan’s point of view. In doing so, Carino focuses on the riddle’s initial violence and the costs of book creation:

While the original riddle personifies the animal being brutally killed, I use my game to instead view the riddle from the point of view of the animal’s “enemy,” who the animal claims stole its life. By removing the animal’s narrative role, I’m forcing the player to view the riddle from a different angle and confront their own humanity and complacency in the animal’s death—a viewpoint that isn’t as emphasized in the riddle but present, nonetheless. Notably, the riddle uses a lot of violent imagery as it comes from the animal’s perspective. In the Twine passage shown below where the calf is being slaughtered by the player, I use HTML styling to make the text vigorously shake and rumble in order to visually translate the animal’s brutal death. The game emphasizes the riddle’s inevitable need for the animal’s death to create an ornate bible.

In keeping with this focus, the tone and aesthetics are neither friendly nor inviting; they are ominous and uncomfortable. The player is addressed as “the reaper” and invited to kill a calf. All player choices are immediately revealed as illusory; if the reader says no to the invitation, that no leads right back to killing. Once the player kills the calf, the game forces the player to watch the blood spatter and the image shake; the riddle’s poetics of violence are remediated into a digital form and onto the human player’s own person. The experience is visually uncomfortable. What is more, no hyperlink to the next page appears until the trembling text, which appears in individual sections after timed delays, reaches its end. Carino uses play time—time without choices, time spent in uncomfortable, powerless contemplation of the animal’s death—to emphasize the loss and violence that begin the book’s creation. Alongside the riddle, the game meditates on the costs and afterlives of knowledge (see Carino’s video, Figure 4). Carino transforms the first-person, animal-perspective riddle narrative into a second-person, human-perspective Twine narrative. Through the use of visually uncomfortable digital effects—choices that deliberately go nowhere; shaking, bleeding text that made at least two readers dizzy and motion-sick—Carino remediates the riddle’s poetics of violence into a digital form and onto the human player’s own person.

Figure 4

Carino’s video.

§23 The assignments exhibited above demonstrate the students’ differing approaches to re-mediating the riddle: using markup and styling to turn the poem’s imagery into interactive text effects; using conditional logic to reconfigure the narrative in time and space; and using the game format itself to make the reader/player complicit with the riddle’s verbal disguises and thematic concerns, its meditation of books’ costs, consequences, and afterlives. Students’ adaptations gave digital form to the themes of time and loss. Their Twine pieces foregrounded themes resonant in the riddle, and also in our shared historical moment. With our class physically displaced, we lost the undigitizable touch of parchment, and its tactile reminders of the animals it was made from and the people who made use of it. We lost, too, our hold on ordinary academic space and time. Instead, every week, each in our own homes around the world, living with the anxiety, grief, and isolation of the pandemic, we took part in hybrid learning. Some of us met synchronously, in live weekly webinars, in which we “spoke” via text chat and did not see one another’s faces; others joined asychronously, from other time zones, by viewing recordings and by Slack-messaging and emailing colleagues and teaching staff. While some praise pandemic-driven remote learning’s “anytime, anywhere” independence from academic time and space, and cite it as an advantage over in-person learning (Alhadreti 2020), many students and instructors have perceived pandemic-time “Zoom learning” as an experience of disorientation, isolation, and loss (Fawaz and Samaha 2021; Chaturvedi, Vishwakarma, and Singh 2021; Cesare Schotzko 2020).

§24 In a matryoshka doll of metatextuality, students took a medieval riddle about making textual objects—the precarity of the first animal life, the endurance of reading communities—and brought it into conversation, across a thousand years, with digital textuality in the historical context of a global pandemic.

§25 That transhistorical conversation is incited by the riddle itself. Riddle 26 (or 24) closes with an invitation to readers or listeners: “find what I am called.” The verb in the original Old English, “fricgan,” means “to ask, inquire, question, or learn” (Dictionary of Old English: A to I Online 2018). It implies an active, purposeful seeking after knowledge, much like the “active participation and learner’s responsibility for discovering knowledge that is new to the learner” that characterizes inquiry-based learning (Pedaste et al. 2015). This challenge is a common motif of the Exeter Book riddles: more than half include an exhortation that readers and listeners actively interpret the verbal play and uncover the solution. Sometimes this exhortation is oral: audience members are asked to “saga hwæt ic hatte,” say what I (the object) am called. At other times, the challenges are textual: several riddles use text encoding (writing words backwards and/or in the runic alphabet) to disguise their solutions (see Bitterli 2009, 114–32).

§26 The similarities between the rhetoric of riddles and that of IBL point to a deeper parallel: medieval riddles were an instrument of learning, using verbal transformations of the world to invite their readers to inquire and reflect. In early medieval England, the Exeter Book riddles have as their most prominent precursors the poetic or playful riddles of scholars such as Aldhelm and Alcuin. The riddles of Aldhelm and Alcuin were teaching texts (for Aldhelm, see Lendinara 1991 and Stork 1990; for Alcuin, see Fox 2005, 222). Through riddles and puzzles, Aldhelm and Alcuin teach Latin poetic form and meter and transmit an encyclopedic knowledge of nature and history (Howe 1985, Salvador-Bello 2015). Aldhelm and Alcuin also use the riddlic form to cultivate wonder (Dailey 2012; Lockhart 2017, 56) and to teach readers how to read and interpret literary and religious texts (Weaver 2019).

§27 As Jessica Lockhart observes, teaching through inquiry is central to riddle poetics. Through poetic transformations of objects and ideas, riddles defamiliarize the everyday and inspire wonder. In turn, wonder “act[s] as a ‘lure’ for engaging the processes of riddle-solving and thereby exposing (and training) the responses of the would-be solver” (Lockhart 2017, 124, paraphrasing Dailey 2012, 468–469). In this process, riddles make visible not only the qualities of the objects they disguise, but the thought process by which riddle-solvers interpret the poetic texts, engage with their enigmas, and create new knowledge. This precise dynamic underlies humanities IBL: from defamiliarization of a subject, to learning about that subject, to learning about the process of learning itself. Karen Manarin uses this dynamic to describe her own pedagogical initiative:

I highlight aspects of student learning often obscured in the research paper and make claims about how learning may work in this context, and perhaps in other contexts. As my students explored a less familiar genre, disciplinary processes of knowledge creation were defamiliarized and made visible. (Manarin 2016, 57)

Manarin proceeds to trace this verbal motif of learning or thoughts “made visible” through the scholarship of teaching and learning, demonstrating the importance in IBL of this phenomenological progression from defamiliarization to discovery and learning and hence to metacognition.

§28 Metacognition is especially emphasized, both in the Exeter Book riddles and in DH pedagogy, through focus on text technologies. As we noted above, in DH pedagogy, the focus on the materiality of knowledge invites us to consider knowledge creation and knowledge transmission as cultural artifacts. Similarly, in the Exeter Book riddles, metacognition emerges especially strongly in riddles about books and writing instruments, so-called “scriptorium riddles” (Shook 1974). As these riddles meditate on physical books, quills, or letters, they necessarily contemplate knowledge production and knowledge transmission, as both individual and cultural processes. The book- and writing-riddles situate themselves in a cultural zone in which orality and literacy coexist and complicate each other: Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe observes “the use of mouthless speakers, dead lifegivers, clipped pinions—all metaphors of loss” as a reflection of the gap between speech and writing, the hybrid encounter zone between orality and literacy (O’Keeffe 1990, 54). Meanwhile, Peter Ramey argues that the book and writing riddles represent “writing technology, through the lens of an oral poetics, as a material form of speech” (Ramey 2013). Turning from technology to metacognition, Dietrich Bitterli discusses the riddles’ metacognitive and metatextual play, their invitation “to think about the very act of riddle-making and riddle-solving, of writing and reading” (Bitterli 2009, Chapter 7, “Silent Speech,” 135–150). (For other reflections on the materiality and metatextuality of the riddles, see Shook 1974, Lerer 1991, Bitterli 2009, Symons 2017, and Weaver 2019.)

§29 Jessica J. Lockhart sees another one of the writing technology riddles, the Bookmoth riddle, in its meditation on books, reading, and memory, as “a model of reception for the [riddle] tradition as a whole” (Lockhart 2017, 133–135). As we, in our turn, focus on text technologies and knowledge productions, our adaptations of the riddle engage in the kinds of reading procedures that the riddles suggest: transformation, defamiliarization, and disguise; what Lockhart calls “affective attention,” a close reading absorbed in the details and their significance; an examination of writing technology as a pathway to metacognition (Lockhart 2017, 60, 65, 77). Our adaptations are, in Bruno Latour and Adam Lowe’s terms, re-performances (Latour and Lowe 2011). We engage with the poem through transformative reading procedures that the poem itself encodes. The students’ work illustrates Sarah Whitcomb Laiola’s argument in favor of teaching e-literature through remediation and critical making:

Engaging the text in this way allows users not only to physically experience the kinetics and aesthetics of the augmented reality text, but also to engage the materiality and interaction poetics at the heart of the piece—precisely those poetics that are lost when the only available access to a text is a recording to be consumed. (Laiola 2020)

Laiola is writing about making e-literature as a way of studying and preserving e-literature. Our project is a little different: we made the riddle into e-literature as a way of participating in riddle poetics, a way of taking up the riddle’s closing invitation to inquire into its naming and its nature. By creating their adaptations, students experience not a medieval book, but a medieval poetics of learning within the riddle genre.

Recommending editor:

Lisa Fagin Davis, Medieval Academy of America, Simmons University, USA

Recommending referees:

Elaine Treharne, Stanford University, USA

Andrew N. J. Dunning, University of Oxford, UK

Section editor:

Morgan Pearce, The Journal Incubator, University of Lethbridge, Canada

Chief copy and layout editor:

Christa Avram, The Journal Incubator, University of Lethbridge, Canada