CILICIAN RIDDLES

Although Muslim poets accommodated linguistic and cultural heterogeneity in their compositions, they were not alone in this practice. Chapter 6 examines how Armenian poets adapted vocabulary, genres, themes, tropes, and styles from Islamicate literature around medieval Cilicia, the last Armenian kingdom. As it shows, such poets generally instructed their audiences to read their compositions within a distinctly Christian interpretive frame. For example, St. Nerses Shnorhali (d. 1173), the head of the Armenian church, rewrote the Bible as a series of interlocking riddles that train an audience to read scripture in a particular manner. In a complementary manner yet a different literary register, the celebrated poet Frik adapted and rewrote Persian poetry, directing his audience to interpret these poetics within a Christianizing framework. By bringing these poets into dialogue with one another, this chapter reads early Armenian vernacular poetry through the literary practices that shaped it, such as gloss and quotation in particular. As it demonstrates, it is precisely the ways in which these poets did not translate wholesale texts that enabled them to recast different literary cultures within a Christian idiom.