Jennifer Neville

St Boniface, the eighth-century scholar, missionary, and eventual martyr, is generally characterized as an important historical figure but a bad poet. In part it is because his verse is so strongly marked by direct borrowings from Aldhelm that it is easy to assume he did not possess the creativity or ability to write for himself. Here, we seek to rehabilitate Boniface’s collection of Latin riddles about the personified Virtues and Vices, engaging especially with Humilitas Cristiana (‘Christian Humility’), Virginitas … humilium (‘Virginity of the Humble’), Superbia (‘Pride’), and Vana gloria iactantia (‘Vainglorious Boasting’). We examine Boniface’s riddles through the lens of fan studies, arguing that fandom and fan fiction provide insights into group-identity formation and gift-giving that reframe Boniface’s debt to Aldhelm, as well as his entire creative project. Like a writer of fan fiction, Boniface creates new characters based on his reading of Aldhelm’s De virginitate (‘Concerning Virginity’) and, through them, he develops Aldhelm’s warning against taking pride in virtue. However, Boniface’s riddle-subjects speak an encoded message that only a true fan of Aldhelm could appreciate. Distance from this fandom has led to scholarly neglect of a fascinating poetic collection, but we hope to bridge the gap.

Temporal graph representation learning (T-GRL) aims to learn representations that model how graph edges evolve over time. While recent works on T-GRL have improved link prediction accuracy in temporal settings, their methods optimize a point-wise loss function independently over future links rather than optimize jointly over a candidate set per node. In applications where resources (e.g., attention) are allocated based on ranking links by likelihood, the use of a ranking loss is preferred. However it is not straightforward to develop a T-GRL method to optimize a ranking loss due to a tradeoff between model expressivity and scalability. In this work, we address these issues and propose a Temporal Graph network for Ranking (TGRank), which significantly improves performance for link prediction tasks by (i) optimizing a list-wise loss for improved ranking, and (ii) incorporating a labeling approach designed to allow for efficient inference over the candidate set jointly, while provably boosting expressivity. We extensively evaluate TGRank over six real networks. TGRank outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines on average by 14.21%↑ (transductive) and 16.25% ↑ (inductive) in ranking metrics while being more efficient (up-to 65 × speed-up) to make inference on large networks.

Francis Leneghan takes on the monster that is Beowulf and seeks to wrestle something new from this much-studied text. This is a risky undertaking: after so much scholarship (much of which Leneghan generously digests here), anything truly new is probably going to be wrong. Leneghan treads the fine line. His well-researched and carefully supported argument that the poem ‘explores different stages in the dynastic life-cycle’ (p. 28), brings a fresh perspective to many aspects of the text – although not so radical a reading as the title given to his list of the characters of the poem, ‘Dramatis Personae’, might initially suggest. Leneghan’s Introduction, ‘Reading Beowulf as a Book of Kings’, is invaluable for summarizing – clearly, accurately and even-handedly – much of the major scholarship of the past 150 years. It also sets out his key argument, that Beowulf is not a poem primarily about monsters or a single hero, but rather a poem about the rise and fall of dynasties. This focus allows elements of the poem that have previously seemed problematic to receive a fresh look. Chapter 1, ‘The Dynastic Life-Cycle and the Structure of the Poem’, sets out this argument in full, addressing the long-vexed question of the relationship between the two halves of the poem, the fifty-year narrative gap between them, and the role of ‘digressions’. Chapter 2, ‘Shaping the Dynastic Drama’, explores how the poet adapted folk stories (the Norse analogues of which are usefully summarized in appendices) and legendary material pertaining to Hygelac, the king of the Geats and Beowulf’s uncle, to create the character of Beowulf. Chapter 3, ‘The Role of the Monsters in the Dynastic Drama’, to some extent reverses J. R. R. Tolkien’s influential elevation of the monster episodes over the political events in the poem; Leneghan argues instead that the monsters are portents of dynastic strife, interpretable through biblical parallels. Chapter 4, ‘Beowulf and Biblical Kingship’, explores how Old Testament models of kingship were reflected in Merovingian, Carolingian and Early Anglo-Saxon dynasties, and traces how important themes of legitimacy and stability in succession are developed in Beowulf, in comparison with Bede’s portraits of good rulers such as Æthelfrith and Edwin. In the Conclusion, ‘Reading the Dynastic Drama in Anglo-Saxon England’, Leneghan situates his reading of the poem in three contexts: Mercia in the age of Bede (c. 650–c. 800 CE), when the poem was created; Alfredian Wessex (871–899 CE), when the poem was first read as a critique of pagan kingship; and the end of Æthelred’s reign and the beginning of Cnut’s, when the two scribes were writing the Nowell codex, in which the only surviving copy of the poem is found. Overall, this is a compelling and persuasive argument which taught me a great deal, and which will be carefully digested and debated for many years to come. [https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqac045]

This article argues that the nature of the Riddles makes them a dangerous source for Anglo-Saxon material culture, not least because the absence of solutions in the manuscript is one of their essential characteristics, which was recognized by the scribe and all subsequent Anglo-Saxon readers. Unlike riddles in most other traditions, they do not include recourse to an authoritative solution. When we approach these texts, we need to keep this characteristic in mind. With their illimitable potential for additional, competing solutions, the Riddles thus pose very serious problems for modern scholars seeking facts. Not all the Riddles are so evasive, but in general they need to be treated with more care than is usually the case in discussions of material culture. Whilst they rarely offer the facts that most historians and archaeologists really want, they do indicate attitudes towards and perspectives on the artefacts of the Anglo-Saxon world.

Although one of the notorious “obscene” riddles, Exeter Book Riddle 12 contains more than sexual titillation and denial. This article will address the text's antithetical pairings. Observing these pairings highlights issues of race, class, gender, and morality, but the text confounds any straightforward process of separating self from other in any of these areas and presents a disturbing enmeshing of the two that contradicts the usual expectations of a well-ordered, moral Anglo-Saxon society.

The Old English riddles are generally valued for their triviality—for their humour and their connection to ordinary life. In this article, however, I argue that the characteristic incongruity of the riddles can be much more than a genre-marker. In one group of riddles, the so-called ‘implement riddles’, descriptions that, on the surface, seem to be too ridiculous to be true and thus instantly dismissible can be seen to present a remarkable discussion of dangerously radical ideas about reciprocal obligation and mutual power sharing.