But I could still have an ongoing relationship with the texts by drawing inspiration from them, adapting their imagery to my own purposes while trying to retain some of the mystery that had so attracted me. I would not be spending the rest of my life employing my creativity in service of hunting down the different definitions of words in the Old English and Old Icelandic that shifted the meaning of the poems, or analysing the manuscript trying to spot possible transmission errors from oral to written form, or theorising about their relationship to the material cultures of the era. Reality flickered in the telling, the thing described might be a human warrior or a badger defending his set from line to line, gaining and losing contours in the mind’s eye. The Riddles conjure up a lost world of ploughs and oxen, masters and Welsh slaves, butter churns, drinking horns, cows transformed into pages of vellum and so much more. Returning to the riddles of the Exeter Book (to which Riddle 40 belongs) as part of my Master’s degree, with the dawning realisation that I would not be going on to do a PhD in the subject I was studying, I was suddenly struck by how many of them gave voice to objects that may have been people or people who may have been objects. For much of my early twenties, I was unable to write, my brain overstuffed with Medieval literature and literary theory, concerns about whether I would become an academic battling with plans for the usual student antics of pubs and parties. When trying to describe the writing of Parallel Hells, I find my mind called back a thousand years towards this anonymous Old English poet’s account of setting words down on the page, in very different circumstances to my own, although the sense of the ‘wiga’ or warrior fighting to direct the fingers’ route to form each word remains much the same.

Three fingers and a quill move swiftly, leaving the written word black behind them, they are faster than birds when travelling over paths of gold.

Dark were their tracks,Įxeter Book Riddle 40, Paul Franklin Baum translation

Parallel hells by leon craig