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An Enduring Enigma: Shedding Light on the Text of the Leiden Riddle, 1845–2025

Paper · 2026 · Thijs Porck

Summary

The paper looks at why the Leiden Riddle, an Old English poem on the final leaf of Leiden University Libraries VLQ 106, has a solution nobody disputes (a mail-coat) but a text nobody can fully read. The folio is worn, and a chemical reagent applied in the nineteenth century made it worse. Porck reconstructs 180 years of editorial work using published editions and unpublished archival records such as visitor notes, loan registers, letters and restoration reports.

He follows a sequence of readers:

  • Bethmann's error-filled first transcription (1845)
  • Dietrich's critical edition (1859), made from the manuscript on loan
  • later readings aided by ultraviolet fluorescent photography, including the unresolved dispute between Parkes and Gerritsen

His main finding is that each new technology made more of the text legible but never produced a reading everyone accepts. Every edition stayed partly a personal interpretation. Imaging work in the 2020s has so far been inconclusive. This matters for anyone working with damaged witnesses: better tools do not end interpretive disagreement; they move it somewhere new. Appendices collect the proposed readings and a full bibliography.

Key points

  • The riddle is on fol. 25v of VLQ 106, a ninth-century Fleury manuscript of Latin riddles by Symphosius and Aldhelm. A Fleury scribe copied it from an insular exemplar he found unfamiliar.
  • It adapts Aldhelm's De lorica, turning each Latin verse into two Old English lines. A second version survives as Exeter Book Riddle 35, which is in Late West Saxon rather than Old Northumbrian and replaces the arrow clue with a closing challenge to the reader.
  • Dietrich borrowed VLQ 106 for Marburg from 5 March to 13 April 1859. He was the first to link the riddle to Aldhelm and to the Exeter Book version.
  • Parkes (1972) and Gerritsen (1984) disagree on ten places in the text, including Uaat vs Uuat and hafæ vs hefæ. Both relied on UV fluorescent photography.
  • In 2000, alumni raised 4000 guilders to rebind the manuscript. In the 2020s it was examined with RIS combined with ICA, PCA and NMF, and with Macro XRF scanning; the results are inconclusive or still pending.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Instead of forcing a single text, the paper sets out competing scholarly readings side by side, place by place, as a table of variants. This makes the disagreement itself the object of study.
  • I2. Gerritsen asks readers to quietly read his "certain" judgments as subjective, which amounts to tying confidence to whoever made the judgment.
  • I3. The Leiden and Exeter versions are two dialect witnesses of one poem, with pairs such as ueta/wæta and herum/hærum lining up systematically.
  • I4. The Exeter version drops one clue (the arrows) and becomes more ambiguous, a natural experiment in how much each clue contributes to a solution.
  • I5. Each Latin verse becomes exactly two Old English lines, a regular structure-preserving expansion that keeps alignment between source and output visible.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (learn): Silver-data agreement could store per-token disagreements between witness parsers as a variant table rather than discarding them, which would show where the parsers are systematically uncertain.
  • I2 (answer): Answers could label each supporting claim with which component asserted it and how firmly, so an explanation reveals whose judgment it rests on.
  • I3 (tokens): Aligned variant pairs across dialects or spelling standards could be mined as normalization rules feeding lemmas, so variant spellings resolve to one lemma.
  • I4 (answer): Riddle and QA tests could remove individual clues to check whether the reader's answer actually depends on the evidence, acting as a negative control.
  • I5 (back): Generation or translation through the meta-world could use fixed unit-to-unit expansion templates, so every output sentence traces back to a specific source frame.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Leiden UniversityLeiden · Netherlands32 works · 1,074 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksHistory · 85 worksClassics · 116 works

Cite

Cite as Thijs Porck. 2026. An Enduring Enigma: Shedding Light on the Text of the Leiden Riddle, 1845–2025. SELIM 31.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{porck2026enduring,
  title = {{An Enduring Enigma: Shedding Light on the Text of the Leiden Riddle, 1845–2025}},
  author = {Thijs Porck},
  booktitle = {SELIM 31},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.17811/selim.31.2026.81-113},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.17811/selim.31.2026.81-113}
}

References

59 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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