Three songs for two and three treble voices with piano. Performed by Archie White Ivan Chetverikov, Freddy Rowntree and Maki Sekiya (Piano)

These songs are settings of poems from the Exeter Book, which is a collection of many different writings, and is generally acknowledged to be one of the great works of the English Benedictine revival of the tenth century. The Exeter Book's heritage becomes traceable from 1072, when Leofric, Bishop of Exeter bestowed in his will upon the then-impoverished monastery, "a large English book of poetic works about all sorts of things" Among the other texts in the Exeter Book, there are over ninety riddles or kennings.. The difference between a riddle and a kenning, I discovered, is that the answer to a riddle is in itself meaningless - a means to an end, a guessing game. The Kennings of the Exeter Book, on the other hand, are part of an ancient tradition of learning through memorable metaphor, much valued in the Anglo-Saxon world. They are written in the style of Anglo-Saxon poetry and range in topics from the religious to the mundane, nature, God and sex.

Three Kennings

Jeremy Arden