The Key, The Secret

Another beautiful autumn day; it's as if they only come round on Thursdays. I've been having fun reading about the Angles and Saxons recently - particularly a Saxon chieftain with the unlikely name of "Abba", and the different dialects that crop up in descriptions of him. For someone like me, having spoken all my life with a distinct Black Country accent, it's fascinating to learn that Saxons in Mercia in the eighth and ninth centuries apparently talked roughly the same way as me; at least if their spellings of words like man ("mon") and you ("eow") are representative of their pronunciations.

How does this relate to today's picture? Well, in the course of my reading, I was tickled by this tenth-century Anglo-Saxon riddle:

A wondrous thing hangs by a man's thigh,
full under the clothes. In front is a hole.
It is stiff and hard, it knows its proper place;
when a young man lifts his tunic
above his knee, he wants to be able
to enter with the head of his hanging thing
the hole that it has often filled before.

The object in question is, of course...a key. Obviously. Bet you got that one straight away. Hmm?