20151203.0616

Things went well with my classes yesterday. I had known that, in preparation for the upcoming exam, I would offer my students a sort of walk-through, a guided practice. When I talked with them on Monday, discussing doing so, they suggested that they might like to have one of the "funnier" riddles to play with. After verifying the choice ("Really? Are you sure you can handle it?" "Yeah!"), I acceded to the request, and the guided practice yesterday treated the key riddle from the Exeter Book (usually numbered 44). Aaron K. Hostetter of Rutgers University translates it as follows:*

Something amazing hangs by
a man’s thigh —
under its lord’s nap
a hole at its head
It is stiff and hard—
it keeps its place well.
When the servant
heaves over his knee
his own garment,
wishes to greet
the usual hole
with his dangling head
that he has before
often filled up
equally long.

Hilarity ensued. After walking through the proofreading portion of the exercise--when I give riddles to my students, I embed usage errors into them, offering practice in finding and correcting such things that I continue to hope will transfer to the students' own writing--the students had a fine time offering answers and explaining how they correspond to the text. Several tumbled (pardon the pun) to the "correct" answer, calling it a key and explaining why they did so. One or two offered the ideas of swords and sheathes, which work decently enough.

Only a couple actually said "what everyone's thinking," asserting that the answer is, in fact, "penis," and arguing how the text upholds the interpretation. In one case, another student in the class offered up a counterargument, arguing halfheartedly against the "something amazing"--the counterargument student presents as male--and more emphatically against the "stiff and hard." A comment about the peril of persistence of penile erection was offered, and the student who argued that the answer is "penis" acknowledged the problem. That is, a student offered a considered opinion, another offered a considered refutation, and the first student accepted the refutation as valid. Exactly the kind of thing that is supposed to happen in the world happened in my classroom, and it did so because of a joke more than a thousand years old.

I am understandably pleased by this.

*I am using his translation because I do not want to dig mine out or do another one at the moment.