1. 1. Unless noted otherwise, quotations of Old English verse are from The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records [henceforth ASPR], ed. George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, 6 vols. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press and London: Routledge, 1931–53). Riddle numeration follows Krapp and Dobbie’s edition of The Exeter Book, ASPR, vol. 3. Craig Williamson’s edition represents a different numeration: The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina, 1977). All translations from Old English to modern English are mine.
2. 2. On the work of scribes also being an act of composition, see Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, “The Performing Body on the Oral-Literate Continuum: Old English Poetry,” in Teaching Oral Traditions, ed. John Miles Foley (New York: Modern Language Association, 1998; repr. 2002), pp. 46–58.
3. 3. In addition to Exeter Riddle 26, Riddle 51 focuses on the relationship between quills, writing, and flight, not unlike Aldhelm’s Latin Enigma 59. See Michael J. Warren’s discussion of Riddle 51 in Birds in Medieval English Poetry: Metaphors, Realities, Transformations (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2018), pp. 96–101.
4. 4. Major exceptions are Paul Sorrell, "Like a Duck to Water: Representations of Aquatic Animals in Early Anglo-Saxon Literature and Art," Leeds Studies in English, n. s. 25 (1994), 29-68 and the scholarship of Warren and Eric Lacey: Warren, Birds in Medieval English Poetry and "Native Foreigners: Migrating Seabirds and the Pelagic Soul in The Seafarer," English Studies, 98 (2017), 825-45
5. Lacey, "Birds and Bird-Lore in the Literature of Anglo-Saxon England" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. College London, 2013), "Birds and Words: Aurality, Semantics, and Species in Anglo-Saxon England," in Sensory Perception in the Medieval West, ed. Simon C. Thomson and Michael D. J. Bintley (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 75-98, "Beowulf's Blithe-Hearted Raven," in Representing Beasts in Early Medieval England and Scandinavia, ed. Bintley and Thomas J. T. Williams (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2015), pp. 113-30, and Kristopher Poole and Lacey, "Avian Aurality in Anglo-Saxon England," World Archeology, 46.3 (2014), 400-15. Poetic images of birds do take center stage in scholarship on Exeter Riddles 7-10, but their analysis generally pertains to this sequence alone. See Peter R. Kitson, "Swans and Geese in Old English Riddles," Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archeology and History, 7 (1994), 79-83