Adrian and Ritheus
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Adrian and Ritheus is an Old English prose literary text preserved in British Library manuscript Cotton Julius A ii, fols 137v-140.[1] It comprises of a dialogue of 48 formulaic questions and answers between the titular Adrian and Ritheus.[1]: 35–40 Adrian interrogates Ritheus using the formulaic expression Saga me ('tell me'); Ritheus responds using the formulaic Ic þe secge ('I tell you').[1]: 35 The nature of the questions posed varies between the factual and the enigmatic.
Many of the questions asked in Adrian and Ritheus are also featured in the prose version of Solomon and Saturn, a text with 'clear relationships' to the former.[1]: 7
Proper names in the text
Place names
Glið
In question 6, Adrian asks where the sun shines at night. Ritheus answers that it shines on three places: the belly of a whale called Leviathan; then Hell; then an island called Glið, where 'the souls of holy men rest [...] until Doomsday'.[1]: 35–6 Alongside the heavenly implications of the resting place of 'holy men', Pheifer suggests this could be the result of a series of scribal mistranscriptions of gliew or gleow (joy, delight) because of the proximity of graphemes <þ> and <ƿ>.[1]: 133–4
Malifica and Intimphonis
In question 19 of the dialogue, Adrian asks Ritheus to tell him 'who are the two men in Paradise, and these continually weep and are sorrowful'[1]: 142 , to which Ritheus answers 'Henoch and Elias'. Adrian then asks where they live, to which Ritheus replies,
Ic þe secge, Malifica and Intimphonis; þæt is on simfelda and on sceanfelda[1]: 37 [I tell you, Malifica and Intimphonis; that is in Simfelda and in Sceanfelda].[1]: 144
Cross and Hill suggest that the name Intimphonis and sceanfelda may be accounted for by the fact that two glosses in works by Aldhelm would gloss the verbally-similar Latin In tempis to the verbally-similar Old English on scenfeldum. They further suggest that simfelda may be a scribal mistranscription of sinnfelda ('place of sin', from sinn), thus likening it conceptually to Malifica, which seems to echo Latin maleficium ('sin, vice, injury').[1]: 144–5
Wright reads sceanfelda as scinfelda,[1]: 37 which Roberts speculates may derive from the noun scinn 'spectre'.[2] Another reading is Kemble's sunfelda[1]: 37 (including sun, perhaps from 'son' or 'sun').
Neorxnawang
The first question of the dialogue, Adrian asks Saga me hu lange wæs Adam on neorxnawange[1]: 35 ('tell me how long Adam was [on the neorxnawange]'[1]: 127 ), a contested term often used to express the concept of 'Paradise' in the Old English corpus. The same question is asked in the prose version of Solomon and Saturn, as the variant form neorxenawang.[1]: 28
Naming animals
Belda the fish
In question 24, Adrian asks which creatures are hermaphroditic.[1]: 28 Ritheus tells him these are 'Belda the fish in the sea [...] Viperus the serpent and Corvus the bird'. Cross and Hill argue that Belda is a scribal corruption of Latin belua ('beast'). The reading of belua as a type of sea-beast may also be a misunderstanding of the Latin etymon, since belua is a name for the hyena in earlier Latin texts - an animal understood to be bisexual (and hence symbolically hermaphroditic) at the time of their composition.[1]: 148
Levathian
In question 6, Adrian asks where the sun shines at night. One of Ritheus' three answers is that it shines 'on the belly of the whale which is called Leviathan'.[1]: 131