Professor Frederic Tupper in his scholarly work _The Riddles of the Exeter Book_ says: "By far the most numerous of all riddles of lapsing or varying solutions are those distinctly popular and unrefined problems whose sole excuse for being (or lack of excuse) lies in double meaning and coarse suggestion, and the reason for this uncertainty of answer is at once apparent. The formally stated solution is so overshadowed by the obscene subject implicitly presented in each limited motive of the riddle, that little attention is paid to the aptness of this. It is after all only a pretence, not the chief concern of the jest." He quotes from another scholar, Wossidlo, a number of other objects than those suggested in the Exeter Book, which in other riddle books were invested with sexual symbolism. These are spinning wheel, kettle and pike, yarn and weaver, frying-pan and hare, soot-pole, butcher, bosom, fish on the hook, trunk-key, beer-keg, stocking, mower in grass, butter-cask and bread-scoop. Freud is apparently correct when he stated that familiar objects of our day like umbrellas and machinery are given a sexual significance by our dreams unconsciously. That man early expressed his interest in love in symbolical terms is conceded by most anthropologists and philologists. They have traced the origins of many of our customs and institutions, our words and figures of rhetoric, to the veiled eroticism of former times. In our speech are many terms which now have a distinct sexual significance, though they originally had a symbolic one. The word for seed in Hebrew is zera, the Latin word is semen (from sero, to sow). Both words are also used for spermatozoa. Man formerly sought analogies just as he does to-day; he often feared to violate a taboo, or aimed at a delicacy of expression. He saw the life producing principle at work everywhere, and he found symbols for it in the phenomena of nature, in the sun, moon, water, forest, garden, field, trees, roses; in animals like the serpent, the horse, the bull, the fish, the goat, the dove; in implements like the arrow, the sword, the plough. Common objects assumed for him suggestive meanings. He saw a means of coining new expressions for generative acts and objects; he found associations when he used the fire-drill drilling in the hollow of the wood, or when he threw wood upon the fire. In later time he coined new symbolical terms suggested by such acts of his as stuffing a cork in a bottle, or putting bread in the oven, or inserting a key in the lock. Man speaks in symbolic language especially when it comes to sex matters. This symbolism appears hence in his dreams and his literature. The language of the unconscious is symbolic, and literature is often expressing the author's unconscious in symbolic terms without his being aware of this.