The Cross Before the Riddle

In a flat field outside Quadring — a village whose name the philologists still argue over, perhaps from an Old English root meaning the meeting place of speech, perhaps from something older that the dictionaries have not yet caught — a man named Rafał Wesołowski, born in Boston (the Lincolnshire one, though every Boston in the world is in some sense a copy of every other Boston), passed his metal detector over the soil and heard the small electronic cough that means silver. What he lifted out, in May of a recent year, was a finger ring twenty-three millimetres across, scored with sixteen runic characters arranged left to right, beginning with a cross and ending in a punctuation mark whose function nobody yet understands. The University of Nottingham has filed a report. The runes, so far, will not yield. They sit on the silver-gilt band like sixteen small stones placed in a circle by a child who refused to explain.

In the fenland, the dead speak through such things. To find a ring of this period in South Holland is to feel the breath of the Lindiswaras, the people of Lindsey — the kingdom that drowned under the Mercian flood and the Danish flood and the East Anglian flood and at last under the slow, mannered flood of drainage engineers in the seventeenth century. The fens were once a lung. They are a lung pressed flat now. The objects they cough up are bronze and iron and silver, and they all carry the same expression: that of someone who has been holding their breath for a thousand years and is only now being allowed to exhale.

Sixteen characters. The number resists casual symbolism. Not the seven of the Christian week, not the twenty-four of the elder Futhark, not the sixteen of the younger Futhark in some readings — sixteen, the futhorc shortened and sharpened to a point. Preliminary readers see, somewhere in the sequence, the shape that may spell hring: ring. The object names itself, as Anglo-Saxon objects so often did. Hring mec hatte, the inscriber may have written: I am called ring. This is a habit of small literate communities, to give voice to the mute thing they have made, and it is also a riddle in the Exeter Book sense, where the Reed declares that it was by the sound a maiden, and grew where water was. The Quadring ring is its own riddle, and possibly its own solution.

Beside hring, perhaps the name Udnan — a name that appears nowhere else in the surviving record. The cartularies have no Udnan. The Domesday Book is silent. He is a man whose entire posthumous residue is a circle of metal and a row of marks, and even these may not be his name at all but something else: a magical formula, a galdr, a string of letters arranged for their phonetic torque rather than their meaning. The Kingmoor Ring, found in 1817 and now in the British Museum, has thirty runes that no philologist has read with confidence; they hum, but do not speak. The Wheatley Hill Ring, also in the Museum, dates to the eighth century and is engraved with the same fine punched dots that close every stroke on the Quadring band, like vanishing stars at the end of words. Some scholars suspect such inscriptions were never meant to be read aloud at all. The intended reader was the wound, the fever, the hostile spirit. The runes were addressed downward, not outward.

Once, not many nights ago, the spirit walked through a different fenland — Suffolk, where a previously unknown medieval settlement was being coaxed up out of the East Anglian soil at the edge of a small town — and watched the same pattern appear. The field returning what the field had been told to keep. There is a hidden geometry in this. Where a community has been forgotten long enough, it begins to want to be remembered. The plough that turns the topsoil is not its enemy but its accomplice. Quadring is now offering, as Friston offered, a community archaeologists did not know to look for: a literate elite, in Lisa Brundle's careful phrase, a place of considerable status, perhaps with a cleric, perhaps with a smith who could engrave silver with a centre punch fine enough to leave dots smaller than the eye expected.

It is hard, in the fens, not to think of Guthlac, the warrior-saint of Crowland a few miles south, who in the 720s wrestled in the marsh with demons that, as Felix records, spoke in the British tongue — the tongue of the conquered, surfacing in nightmares. The fens have always been a place where languages bled into one another: Brittonic, Old English, Old Norse, Latin. A ring with sixteen runes is an artefact of that bleeding. Hring as Old English; hringr as Old Norse; the same word at the seam, the seam visible only on the inside of a finger.

In the Sumerian Lugal-