1. W P. Ker comments on Anglo-Saxon literature's affinity for the riddle: "Poetical riddles were produced in England more largely than anywhere else in the Dark Ages, both in Latin and the native tongue.... The difference is that the old English poetical fashions are much more favourable to this kind of entertainment than anything in Latin. It is the proper business, one might say, of the old English poetry to call things out of their right names" (W. P Ker, The Dark Ages [London, 1904], p. 92; hereafter abbreviated D). Northrop Frye makes a bolder claim, identifying the riddle as the primordial form of one of the two basic modes of lyric poetry, which are melos and-the mode proper to the riddle-opsis; see Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, N.J., 1971), p. 280. On the riddle as one of