Riddle 40 was a real chore (a bit dull really, though with some fun parts), but with its completion, that brings the first fifty-one Riddles to completion. Eight more will finish the first section, and from there they get rougher, with many incomplete and damaged texts in the second full section.

These have been fun, with a lot of room for formal variation and play. I direct you to #44 to see how breaking up the lines can stretch the possibilities of the form. I have always been dissatisfied with the metrical invariability of Anglo-Saxon verse. One wonders that if we had poetry surviving from other sources and contexts that there might have been some differences in how poems were shaped.