Pre-Print Version of: ‘Speaking the Unspeakable: Appetite for Deconstruction in Exeter Book Riddle 12’, in Holy and Unholy Appetites: Studies in Honour of Hugh Magennis, ed. by Marilina Cesario, special issue of English Studies, 93.5 (2012), 520-29 [doi: 10.1080/0013838X.2012.698529] Speaking the Unspeakable: Appetite for Deconstruction in Exeter Book Riddle 12 Abstract: 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. Fotum ic fere, foldan slite, grene wongas, þenden ic gæst bere. Gif me feorh losað, fæste binde swearte Wealas, hwilum sellan men. Hwilum ic deorum drincan selle beorne of bosme, hwilum mec bryd triedeð felawlonc fotum, hwilum feorran broht wonfeax Wale wegeð ond þyð, dol druncmennen deorcum nihtum, wæteð in wætre, wyrmeð hwilum fægre to fyre; me on fæðme sticaþ hygegalan hond, hwyrfeð geneahhe, swifeð me geond sweartne. Saga hwæt ic hatte, þe ic lifgende lond reafige ond æfter deaþe dryhtum þeowige. 1 [I travel on feet, slice the earth and its green fields, as long as I bear a spirit. If I lose my life, I firmly bind the dark Welsh—and sometimes better men. Sometimes I give drink to a brave warrior from my belly; sometimes a very proud bride treads on me with her feet; sometimes, brought from far away, a dark-haired Welsh woman, a foolish drunken slave-girl, wiggles, presses, and wets me in water during the dark nights; sometimes she warms me pleasantly by the fire. The wanton’s hand sticks me in an enclosure, moves me frequently, sweeps me through that dark thing. Say what I am called, I who living ravage the land and after death serve the noble multitudes.] Near the end of Riddle 12, we are instructed to Saga hwæt ic hatte “say what I am called” (13b). To do so is simple: almost all scholars accept the solution oxa “ox” (or 1 Quotations from Old English are taken from Krapp and Dobbie, eds. All translations are my own.