Philistine Doomsday and the Vasa Mortis of Solomon and Saturn II

Abstract

This paper reviews and assesses past scholarship on the so-called vasa mortis riddle of the Old English poem Solomon and Saturn II (lines 75-103) before proposing its own solution. It examines the trajectory of the scholarly literature that initially attempts to identify the vasa mortis as an exact answer to a riddle, but more recently aims to free the riddle from any specific solution in order to interpret it more broadly. This paper's own solution to the riddle is that the vasa mortis is to be understood as the thing that will destroy the Philistines at Doomsday. This solution is reached through analogies in the Old English passage and accounts of the traditional etymology of the Philistines, as well as biblical and patristic descriptions of eschatological demons. 2015, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.