ABSTRACT
The previous chapters have considered human relationships with other humans, individually as well as in groups, as well as with animals and landscapes, the more ‘traditional’ topics of environmental criticism. This chapter turns toward things, using recent philosophical insights in the areas of thing theory, object-oriented ontology, and hyperobjects to consider how objects interact with living beings, and vice versa, in the Exeter Book riddles and in the culture in which they were written. Thinking about the many objects described in the riddles, and the natural materials of which they are made, complicates what we think we mean by the word ‘object’ and how ‘objects’ relate to, and are related to, humans. The riddles do not simply describe things, animals, and people, but they transmit ideas and ideologies, cultural assumptions as well as potential resistance to such assumptions, about the roles and functions of animals and other living things, as well as non-living parts of the non-human world. The objects described in many of the riddles provide an opportunity to think as if humans are not the center of consideration, but pushed to the edge, with things made central.
