Old English Enigmatic Poems and Their Reception in Early Scholarship and Supernatural Fiction

The scholarly reception history of the Old English riddles and adjacent “enigmatic poems” Exeter Book reveals a long process creating intelligibility order out complicated obscure manuscript context. Understanding this allows us to see influence poetry on modern creative medievalism, including unexpected medieval “enigmatic” genre supernatural fiction. Specifically, it is argued that folios 122v–123v Anthology was instrumental in inspiring one acknowledged classic ghost stories twentieth century, M.R. James’s “Oh, Whistle, I’ll Come You, My Lad”.