Linguistic evidence suggests that Riddle 40George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie (eds), The Exeter Book, The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), pp. 200-3. was probably not composed before the tenth century.R. D. Fulk, A History of Old English Meter (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), pp. 408–09. This is consistent with the fact that it was clearly translated from a recension of Aldhelm's poem in which lines 61-67 have been moved to before line 44. As the only manuscript of De creatura from Anglo-Saxon England to contain this recension is Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson C. 697, originally written on the Continent but brought to England by the earlier tenth century, and since this manuscript contains some glosses consistent with Riddle 40, it is conceivable and even likely that Riddle 40 was translated from Rawlinson C. 697 itself.Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, 'The Text of Aldhelm’s Enigma no. C in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson C. 697 and Exeter Riddle 40', Anglo-Saxon England, 14 (1985) 61–73. Thomas A. Bredehoft has gone so far as to argue that Riddle 40 enjoys relatively little formulaic diction, but that those lines it does have in common with other Old English poems suggest a particularly strong association with other Exeter Book poems, suggesting that the translation must have been done in the mid-tenth century by someone familiar with a similar corpus of texts, and familiar with Dunstan's promotion of interest in Aldhelm at Glastonbury.Thomas A. Bredehoft, Authors, Audiences, and Old English Verse (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), pp. 107-13.
