Riddle

The modern English word riddle shares its origin with the word read, both stemming from the Common Germanic verb *rēdaną, which meant 'to interpret, guess'. From this verb came the West Germanic noun *rādislī, literally meaning 'thing to be guessed, thing to be interpreted'. From this comes Dutch raadsel, German Rätsel, and Old English *rǣdels, the latter of which became modern English riddle.[3]

Defining riddles precisely is hard and has attracted a fair amount of scholarly debate. The first major modern attempt to define the riddle in modern Western scholarship was by Robert Petsch in 1899,[4] with another seminal contribution, inspired by structuralism, by Robert A. Georges and Alan Dundes in 1963.[5] Georges and Dundes suggested that "a riddle is a traditional verbal expression which contains one or more descriptive elements, a pair of which may be in opposition; the referent of the elements is to be guessed".[5] There are many possible sub-sets of the riddle, including charades, droodles, and some jokes.

In some traditions and contexts, riddles may overlap with proverbs.[6][7][8] For example, the Russian phrase "Nothing hurts it, but it groans all the time" can be deployed as a proverb (when its referent is a hypochondriac) or as a riddle (when its referent is a pig).[9]

Much academic research on riddles has focused on collecting, cataloguing, defining, and typologising riddles. Key work on cataloguing and typologising riddles was published by Antti Aarne in 1918–20,[10] and by Archer Taylor.[11] In the case of ancient riddles recorded without solutions, considerable scholarly energy also goes into proposing and debating solutions.[12]

Whereas previously researchers had tended to take riddles out of their social performance contexts, the rise of anthropology in the post-War period encouraged more researchers to study the social role of riddles and riddling.[13] However, wide-ranging studies of riddles have tended to be limited to Western countries, with Asian and African riddles being relatively neglected.[14]

Riddles have also attracted linguists, often studying riddles from the point of view of semiotics;[15][16] meanwhile, the twenty-first century has seen the rise of extensive work on medieval European riddles from the point of view of eco-criticism, exploring how riddles can inform us about people's conceptualisation and exploration of their environment.[17][18][19][20][21]

The basic form of the writing-riddle is 'White field, black seeds', where the field is a page and the seeds are letters.[24] An example is the eighth- or ninth-century Veronese Riddle:

Here, the oxen are the scribe's finger(s) and thumb, and the plough is the pen. Among literary riddles, riddles on the pen and other writing equipment are particularly widespread.[25][26]

The year-riddle is found across Eurasia.[27] For example, a riddle in the Sanskrit Rig Veda describes a 'twelve-spoked wheel, upon which stand 720 sons of one birth' (i.e. the twelve months of the year, which together have 360 days and 360 nights).[28]

The most famous example of this type is the riddle of the Sphinx. This Estonian example shows the pattern:

The riddle describes a crawling baby, a standing person, and an old person with a walking stick.

This type includes riddles along the lines of this German example:

The conceit here is that Two-legs is a person, Three-legs is a three-legged stool, Four-legs is a dog, and One-leg is a ham hock.

An example of the cow-riddle[31] is given here in thirteenth-century Icelandic form:

The cow has four teats, four legs, two horns, two back legs, and one tail.

The featherless bird-riddle is best known in Central Europe.[33] An English version is:

Here, a snowflake falls from the sky, and is blown off by the wind.

According to Archer Taylor, "the oldest recorded riddles are Babylonian school texts which show no literary polish". The answers to the riddles are not preserved; they include "my knees hasten, my feet do not rest, a shepherd without pity drives me to pasture" (a river? A rowboat?); "you went and took the enemy's property; the enemy came and took your property" (a weaving shuttle?); "who becomes pregnant without conceiving, who becomes fat without eating?" (a raincloud?). It is clear that we have here riddles from oral tradition that a teacher has put into a schoolbook.[35]

It is thought that the world's earliest surviving poetic riddles survive in the Sanskrit Rigveda.[36][37] Hymn 164 of the first book of the Rigveda can be understood to comprise a series of riddles or enigmas[38] which are now obscure but may have been an enigmatic exposition of the pravargya ritual.[39] These riddles overlap in significant part with a collection of forty-seven in the Atharvaveda; riddles also appear elsewhere in Vedic texts.[40][41] Taylor cited the following example: '"Who moves in the air? Who makes a noise on seeing a thief? Who is the enemy of lotuses? Who is the climax of fury?" The answers to the first three questions, when combined in the manner of a charade, yield the answer to the fourth question. The first answer is bird (vi), the second dog (śvā), the third sun (mitra), and the whole is Vishvamitra, Rama's first teacher and counselor and a man noted for his outbursts of rage'.[42]

Accordingly, riddles are treated in early studies of Sanskrit poetry such as Daṇḍin's seventh- or eighth-century Kāvyādarśa.[43]

Early narrative literature also sometimes includes riddles, prominently the Mahabharata, which for example contains the Yaksha Prashna, a series of riddles posed by a nature-spirit (yaksha) to Yudhishthira.[44]

The first riddle collection in a medieval Indic language is traditionally thought to be the riddles of Amir Khusrow (1253–1325), which are written in Hindawi, in verse, in the mātrika metre.[45][46]

As of the 1970s, folklorists had not undertaken extensive collecting of riddles in India, but riddling was known to be thriving as a form of folk-literature, sometimes in verse.[47] Riddles have also been collected in Tamil.[48][49]

While riddles are not numerous in the Bible, they are present, most famously in Samson's riddle in Judges xiv.14, but also in I Kings 10:1–13 (where the Queen of Sheba tests Solomon's wisdom), and in the Talmud.[50] Sirach also mentions riddles as a popular dinner pastime, while the Aramaic Story of Ahikar contains a long section of proverbial wisdom that in some versions also contains riddles.[51] Otherwise, riddles are sparse in ancient Semitic writing.

In the medieval period, however, verse riddles, alongside other puzzles and conundra, became a significant literary form in the Arabic-speaking world,[52] and accordingly in Islamic Persian culture[53] and in Hebrew — particularly in Al-Andalus.[54] Since early Arabic and Persian poetry often features rich, metaphorical description, and ekphrasis, there is a natural overlap in style and approach between poetry generally and riddles specifically; literary riddles are therefore often a subset of the descriptive poetic form known in both traditions as wasf. Riddles are attested in anthologies of poetry and in prosimetrical portrayals of riddle-contests in Arabic maqāmāt and in Persian epics such as the Shahnameh. Meanwhile, in Hebrew, Dunash ben Labrat (920–990), credited with transposing Arabic metres into Hebrew, composed a number of riddles, mostly apparently inspired by folk-riddles.[55] Other Hebrew-writing exponents included Moses ibn Ezra, Yehuda Alharizi, Judah Halevi, Immanuel the Roman and Israel Onceneyra.[50]

In both Arabic and Persian, riddles seem to have become increasingly scholarly in style over time, increasingly emphasising riddles and puzzles in which the interpreter has to resolve clues to letters and numbers to put together the word which is the riddle's solution.

Riddles have been collected by modern scholars throughout the Arabic-speaking world.[56]

Riddles are known to have been popular in Greece in Hellenistic times, and possibly before; they were prominent among the entertainments and challenges presented at symposia.[57] Oracles were also represented as speaking in often riddlic language.[58] However, the first significant corpus of Greek riddles survives in an anthology of earlier material known as the Greek Anthology, which contains about 50 verse riddles,[59] probably put into its present form by Constantine Cephalas, working in the tenth century CE.[60] Most surviving ancient Greek riddles are in verse.[61] In the second chapter of Book III of Aristotle's Rhetoric, the philosopher stated that "good riddles do, in general, provide us with satisfactory metaphors: for metaphors imply riddles, and therefore a good riddle can furnish a good metaphor."[62]

Literary riddles were also composed in Byzantium, from perhaps the tenth century with the work of John Geometres, into the fifteenth century, along with a neo-Byzantine revival in around the early eighteenth century. There was a particular peak around the long twelfth century.[63]

Two Latin riddles are preserved as graffiti in the Basilica at Pompeii.[64] The pre-eminent collection of ancient Latin riddles is a collection of 100 hexametrical riddles by Symphosius which were influential on later medieval Latin writers. The Bern Riddles, a collection of Latin riddles clearly modelled on Symphosius, were composed in the early seventh century by an unknown author, perhaps in northern Italy. Symphosius's collection also inspired a number of Anglo-Saxon riddlers who wrote in Latin.[65] They remained influential in medieval Castilian tradition, being the basis for the second set of riddles in the thirteenth-century Libro de Apolonio, posed by Apolonio's daughter Tarsiana to her father.[66]

The perhaps eighth- or ninth-century Veronese Riddle is a key witness to the linguistic transition from Latin to Romance, but riddles are otherwise rare in medieval romance languages. However, in the early modern period, printed riddle collections were published in French, including the Adevineaux amoureux (printed in Bruges by Colard Mansion around 1479); and Demandes joyeuses en maniere de quolibets, the basis for Wynkyn de Worde's 1511 Demaundes Joyous.[67]

The Exeter Book: the principal manuscript of medieval Germanic-language riddles.

Riddles survive only fragmentarily in Old High German: three, very short, possible examples exist in manuscripts from the Monastery of St Gallen, but, while certainly cryptic,[68] they are not necessarily riddles in a strict sense.[69] About 150 survive in Middle High German, mostly quoted in other literary contexts.[70][71][72] Likewise, riddles are rare in Old Norse: almost all occur in one section of Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks, in which the god Óðinn propounds around 37 riddles (depending on the manuscript).[73] These riddles do, however, provide insights into Norse mythology, medieval Scandinavian social norms, and rarely attested poetic forms.[74]

By contrast, verse riddles were prominent in early medieval England, following the seminal composition of one hundred and one riddles by Aldhelm (c. 639–709), written in Latin and inspired by the fourth- or fifth-century Latin poet Symphosius. Aldhelm was followed by a number of other Anglo-Saxons writing riddles in Latin. This prestigious literary heritage contextualises the survival of nearly one hundred riddles in the tenth-century Exeter Book, one of the main surviving collections of Old English verse. The riddles in this book vary in subject matter from ribald innuendo to theological sophistication. Three, Exeter Book Riddle 35 and Riddles 40/66, are in origin translations of riddles by Aldhelm (and Riddle 35 the only Old English riddle to be attested in another manuscript besides the Exeter Book). Unlike the pithy three-line riddles of Symphosius, the Old English riddles tend to be discursive, often musing on complex processes of manufacture when describing artefacts such as mead (Exeter Book Riddle 27) or a reed-pen or -pipe (Exeter Book Riddle 60). They are noted for providing perspectives on the world which give voice to actors which tend not to appear in Old English poetry, ranging from female slaves to animals and plants, and they often subvert the conventions of Old English heroic and religious poetry.

While medieval records of Germanic-language riddles are patchy, with the advent of print in the West, collections of riddles and similar kinds of questions began to be published. A large number of riddle collections were printed in the German-speaking world and, partly under German influence, in Scandinavia.[75] Riddles were evidently hugely popular in Germany: a recent research project uncovered more than 100,000 early modern German riddles, with the most important collection being that Strassburger Rätselbuch, first published around 1500 and many times reprinted.[76] This is one of the most famous riddles of that time:

That is, "the snow (featherless bird) lies on a bare tree in winter (leafless tree), and the sun (speechless maiden) causes the snow to melt (ate the featherless bird)".[77]

Likewise, early modern English-speakers published printed riddle collections, such as the 1598 Riddles of Heraclitus and Democritus, which includes for example the following riddle:

After the early Middle Ages, the riddle was seldom used as a literary form in English. Tellingly, while Jonathan Swift composed at least eight verse riddles on these such as a pen, gold, and the privy, this was seen as a lapse in taste by many of his contemporaries.[25][79] However, although riddles are seldom used today as a literary form in their own right, they have arguably influenced the approach to poetry of a number of twentieth-century poets, such as Francis Ponge, Wallace Stevens, Richard Wilbur, Rainer M. Rilke, and Henrikas Radauskas.[80] The famed Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote "All is a riddle, and the key to a riddle ... is another riddle".[81]

Riddles continued to flourish until recently as an oral form of entertainment, however; the seminal collection of Anglophone riddles from the early modern period through to the twentieth century is Archer Taylor's.[82] Riddles are, for example, prominent in some early-modern ballads collected from oral tradition. Some of those included in the Child Ballads are "Riddles Wisely Expounded" (Child 1), "The Elfin Knight" (Child 2), "King John and the Bishop" (Child 45), "Captain Wedderburn's Courtship" (Child 46), and "Proud Lady Margaret" (Child 47).[83] Contemporary English-language riddles typically use puns and double entendres for humorous effect, rather than to puzzle the butt of the joke, as in "Why is six afraid of seven?" "Because seven eight nine (eight can be replaced with ate)." These riddles are now mostly children's humour and games rather than literary compositions.

Some riddles are composed of foreign words and play on similar sounds, as in:

There were two cats, 1 2 3 cat and un deux trois cat, they had a swimming race from England to France. Who won?

1 2 3 Cat because Un deux trois quatre cinq (un deux trois cat sank)

This plays on the fact that the French words for four and five are pronounced similarly to the English words "Cat" and "Sank", hence the pun being the cat sank while also counting to five in French.

Few riddles are attested in medieval Celtic languages, though this depends on how narrowly a riddle is defined; some early medieval Welsh and Irish juridical texts have been read as being riddles.[84] One undisputed riddle is attested in medieval Welsh, an elaborate text entitled 'Canu y Gwynt' ('song of the wind') in the fourteenth-century Book of Taliesin probably inspired by Latin riddles on the same theme. However, this record is supplemented by Latin material, apparently from a Brittonic cultural background in North Britain, about Lailoken: in a twelfth-century text, Lailoken poses three riddles to his captor King Meldred.[85]

The earliest riddles attested in Irish are generally held to be found in a short collection from the fifteenth-century Book of Fermoy.[86][87] However, other forms of wisdom contest do occur in Irish literature, such as The Colloquy of the Two Sages, first attested in twelfth-century manuscripts, and in one such contest, in Imthecht na Tromdaime, first attested in the fifteenth century, at least one riddle is arguably posed.[88]

Even research on the post-medieval Celtic-speaking world has yielded a "comparatively meagre corpus".[89]

The corpus of traditional riddles from the Finnic-speaking world (including the modern Finland, Estonia, and parts of Western Russia) is fairly unitary, though eastern Finnish-speaking regions show particular influence of Russian Orthodox Christianity and Slavonic riddle culture. The Finnish for "riddle" is arvoitus (pl. arvoitukset), related to the verb arvata ("guess").

Finnic riddles are noteworthy in relation to the rest of the world's oral riddle canon for its original imagery, their abundance of sexual riddles, and the interesting collision of influences from east and west;[90] along with the attestation in some regions of an elaborate riddle-game.[91] Riddles provide some of the first surviving evidence for Finnish-language literature.[92]

In modern Chinese, the standard word for 'riddle' is mi (謎, literally "to bewilder"). Riddles are spoken of as having a mian (面, "surface", the question component of the riddle), and a di (底, "base", the answer component). Ancient Chinese terms for 'riddle' include yin (讔) and sou (廋), which both mean "hidden".[93]^: 56, 67

Literary riddles in China first begin to be attested in significant numbers around the second century CE.[94][93]^: 54–56

The Chinese riddle-tradition makes much use of visual puns on Chinese characters.[95] One example is the riddle "千 里 会 千 金"; these characters respectively mean 'thousand kilometre meet thousand gold'.

1. The first stage of solving the riddle is verbal:
   1. In Chinese culture, "it is said that a good horse can run thousands of kilometers per day", so "千 里" (thousand kilometer) is resolved as "马" (horse).
   2. Meanwhile, because "a daughter is very important in the family", in Chinese culture it is possible to resolve "千 金" (thousand gold) as "女" (daughter).
2. The second stage of solving the riddle is visual: combining the radical "马" (horse) with the radical "女" (daughter) produces the character "妈" (mother).

Thus the answer to "thousand kilometres meet thousand gold" is "妈" (mother).[96]

The posing and solving of riddles has long been an important part of the Chinese Lantern Festival.[97] China also contributed a distinctive kind of riddle known in English as the kōan (Chinese: 公案; pinyin: gōng'àn), developed as a teaching technique in Zen Buddhism in the Tang dynasty (618–907). In this tradition, the answer to the riddle is to be established through years of meditation, informed by Zen thought, as part of a process of seeking enlightenment.[98]

In the twentieth century, thousands of riddles and similar enigmas have been collected, capitalising on the large number of homophones in Chinese. Examples of folk-riddles include:

• There is a small vessel filled with sauce, one vessel holding two different kinds. (Egg)
• Washing makes it more and more dirty; it is cleaner without washing. (Water)
• When you use it you throw it away, and when you do not use it you bring it back. (Anchor)[99]

Quite similar to its English counterpart, the riddle in the Philippines is called Bugtong.[100] It is traditionally used during a funeral wake together with other games such as tong-its or the more popular sakla, later generations use Bugtong as a form of past time or as an activity. One peculiarity of the Filipino version is the way they start with the phrase Bugtong-bugtong before saying the riddle, usually it is common to create riddles that rhyme.

This is an example of a Tagalog Bugtong:

Further south, in Sulawesi, Indonesia, among the Pendau, riddles are also used at funeral gatherings.[101]

Anthropological research in Africa has produced extensive collections of riddles over the last century or so.[102] Riddles have been characterised as "one of the most important forms of oral art in Africa";[103] Hamnett analyzes African riddling from an anthropological viewpoint;[104] Yoruba riddles have enjoyed a recent monograph study.[105] Wambi Cornelius Gulere wrote his doctoral project at Makerere University, titled Riddle Performance and Societal Discourses: Lessons from Busoga.[106] He argues for recognition of the importance of the riddling act, not merely gathering and studying lists of riddles. Grivas Muchineripi Kayange has seen African riddles as a window into African philosophy.[107]

Riddles in the Americas are of particular interest to scholarship because it was long thought that native American cultures had no autochthonous riddle traditions (as opposed to riddles inspired by European culture, as with the twenty-two Aztec riddles collected by Bernardino de Sahagún in the sixteenth century, in the famous Florentine codex). [108][109][110] If so, this would have suggested that riddles are not a universal art form.[111] However, Hieronymus Lalemant gave a fairly detailed account of a riddle-contest among the Huron around 1639 as part of a healing ritual.[112]

Someone will say, "What I desire and what I am seeking is that which bears a lake within itself;" and by this is intended a pumpkin or calabash. Another will say, "What I ask for is seen in my eyes—it will be marked with various colors"; and because the same Huron word that signifies "eye" also signifies "glass bead", this is a clue to divine what he desires—namely, some kind of beads of this material, and of different colors.

Accordingly, during the twentieth century, progressively more substantial collections of Native American riddles were made, including from the Alaskan Athabaskans (Ten'a) people in British Columbia;[113][114] Amuzgo people in Central America;[115] and Quechua people in South America.[116] Thus, while data remains rather thin, it seems clear that riddling did exist in the Americas independently of European culture.

Riddles are found extensively in the settler-colonial cultures of the Americas.

One form of riddle features in payada de contrapunto ("counterpoint payada"), a Rioplatense musical genre in which guitar players compete in a symbolic duel.[117] Two guitar players challenge each other in song by asking a riddle-like question and/or answering the opponent's questions. This is performed through several successive rounds of witty exchanges which may include banter and even insults—typically with a humorous intent. The most famous literary example of counterpoint payada comes from Martín Fierro, Part 2, Song 30, verses 6233–6838.[118]

It seems that in ancient Greece, riddle-competitions were popular as an intellectual entertainment at symposia.[57] A key source for this culture is Athenaeus.[120]

Elaborate and unusual riddle-games took place in the culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Finnish-language riddles.[91] For example, Elias Lönnrot observed customary riddle-contests in nineteenth-century Finland:

It took place without teams, but was a kind of a contest: a member of the group would be sent out of the room, the others agreed on the riddle to be posed; for three failures to divine the answer, the riddlee would have to drop out of the game, to step aside, and to "buy" with a token the right to participate again.[102]

In older texts, riddle-contests frequently provide the frame stories whereby riddles have been preserved for posterity.[121] Such contests are a subset of wisdom contests more generally. They tend to fall into two groups: testing the wisdom of a king or other aristocrat; and testing the suitability of a suitor. Correspondingly, the Aarne–Thompson classification systems catalogue two main folktale-types including riddle-contests: AT 927, Outriddling the Judge, and AT 851, The Princess Who Can Not Solve the Riddle.[122]

• In J. R. R. Tolkien's novel The Hobbit, Gollum challenges Bilbo Baggins to a riddle competition for his life. Bilbo breaks "the ancient rules" of the game but is able to escape with Gollum's magic ring. Rather like in the Old Norse Heiðreks saga, although Bilbo asked more of a simple question than a riddle, by attempting to answer it rather than challenging it Gollum accepted it as a riddle; by accepting it, his loss was binding.[123]
• In The Grey King, the third book of Susan Cooper's fantasy sequence The Dark is Rising, Will and Bran must win a riddle game in order for Bran to claim his heritage as the Pendragon.
• In Patricia A. McKillip's The Riddle-Master trilogy, the ancient art of riddlery is taught at the College of Caithnard – the study based on books recovered from the ruins of the School of Wizards. The riddles in the series are composed of three parts – the question, the answer, and the stricture – and are both a way of recording history and a guide to living life. Riddles play a crucial role in the series, the main protagonist, Morgon of Hed, beginning his journey by winning the crown of the kings of Aum in a Riddle Game with the ancient ghost of Peven of Aum; Peven had a standing wager going that no one could win a riddle-game with him, and those who lost against him forfeited their lives. "Beware the unanswered riddle."
• In Stephen King's The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands and The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass, the ka-tet must riddle against Blaine the Mono in order to save their lives. At first Blaine can answer all riddles posed to him by the ka-tet easily, but then Eddie Dean, one of the ka-tet, gains the upper hand when he starts to ask joke riddles, effectively frustrating Blaine's highly logical mind.
• In the Batman comic books, one of the hero's best known enemies is The Riddler who is personally compelled to supply clues about his upcoming crimes to his enemies in the form of riddles and puzzles. Stereotypically, they are these kinds of simple children's riddles, but modern treatments generally prefer to have the character use more sophisticated puzzles.