Abstract
In Exeter Book Riddle 26 (“Gospel Book” or “Bible) the quill’s progress creates bird track, a siþade sweartlast, “dark-track traveled” (l. 11a). Because the poem describes the feather quill with the metaphor fugles wyn, “bird’s joy” (l. 7b), we can infer that the scribe writes with “the joy of a bird,” as if his or her rising and dipping hand, the lifting and resting arm were a wing.
In these images, writing, copying, reading, and the mobility of birds conflate. The very tangible connection between the act of writing and bird’s flight could be one reason that birds were on the minds of insular writers, but the essential role of feathers in manuscript culture cannot fully explain the appeal of bird imagery to Old English poets, given the importance of oral-traditional rhetorical modes in their poetry.
What made fuglas or fleogendan, “fowls, flying ones,” a vital part of the imaginative path taken by so many Old English poems? From riddle to elegy to scriptural translation, we cannot read for long without encountering feathers and talons. I argue here that, as a tool for meditating upon the created world, no other nonhuman creature in Old English poetry rivals them.