riddle

A riddle is a statement, question or phrase having a double or veiled meaning, put forth as a puzzle to be solved. Riddles are of two types: ''enigmas'', which are problems generally expressed in metaphorical or allegorical language that require ingenuity and careful thinking for their solution, and ''conundra'', which are questions relying for their effects on punning in either the question or the answer.

Archer Taylor says that "we can probably say that riddling is a universal art" and cites riddles from hundreds of different cultures including Finnish, Hungarian, American Indian, Chinese, Russian, Dutch and Filipino sources amongst many others. Many riddles and riddle-themes are internationally widespread.

In the assessment of Elli Köngäs-Maranda (originally writing about Malaitian riddles, but with an insight that has been taken up more widely), whereas myths serve to encode and establish social norms, "riddles make a point of playing with conceptual boundaries and crossing them for the intellectual pleasure of showing that things are not quite as stable as they seem" — though the point of doing so may still ultimately be to "play with boundaries, but ultimately to affirm them".

Definitions and research

Etymology

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''.

Definitions

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, with another seminal contribution, inspired by structuralism, by Robert A. Georges and Alan Dundes in 1963.Georges, Robert A.; Dundes, Alan. "Towards a Structural Definition of the Riddle", ''Journal of American Folklore'', 76(300) (1963), 111–18 , . Reprinted in Alan Dundes, ''Analytic Essays in Folklore'' (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), pp. 95–102. 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". 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. 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).

Research

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,Antti Aarne, ''Vergleichende Rätselforschungen'', 3 vols, Folklore Fellows Communications, 26–28 (Helsinki/Hamina: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1918–20). and by Archer Taylor. In the case of ancient riddles recorded without solutions, considerable scholarly energy also goes into proposing and debating solutions.

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. However, wide-ranging studies of riddles have tended to be limited to Western countries, with Asian and African riddles being relatively neglected.

Riddles have also attracted linguists, often studying riddles from the point of view of semiotics; 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.

International riddles

Many riddles appear in similar form across many countries, and often continents. Borrowing of riddles happens both on a local scale, and across great distances. Kofi Dorvlo gives an example of a riddle that has been borrowed from the Ewe language by speakers of the neighboring Logba language: "This woman has not been to the riverside for water, but there is water in her tank". The answer is "a coconut". On a much wider scale, the Riddle of the Sphinx has also been documented in the Marshall Islands, possibly carried there by Western contacts in the last two centuries.

Key examples of internationally widespread riddles follow, based on the classic (European-focused) study by Antti Aarne.

Writing-riddle

The basic form of the writing-riddle is 'White field, black seeds', where the field is a page and the seeds are letters. 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.Luke Powers, "Tests for True Wit: Jonathan Swift's Pen and Ink Riddles", ''South Central Review'', 7.4 (Winter 1990), 40–52; . .

Year-riddle

The year-riddle is found across Eurasia. 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).

Person-riddle

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.

Two-legs, three-legs, and four-legs

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.

Cow-riddle

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

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

Featherless bird-riddle

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

White bird featherless
Flew from Paradise,
Perched upon the castle wall;
Up came Lord John landless,
Took it up handless,
And rode away horseless to the King's white hall.
Here, a snowflake falls from the sky, and is blown off by the wind.

Riddle-traditions by region

The riddle was at times a prominent literary form in the ancient and medieval world, and so riddles are extensively, if patchily, attested in our written records from these periods. More recently, riddles have been collected from oral tradition by scholars in many parts of the world.

Babylon

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; the riddles 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?). These may be riddles from oral tradition that a teacher has put into a schoolbook.

South Asia

It is thought that the world's earliest surviving poetic riddles survive in the Sanskrit ''Rigveda''. Hymn 164 of the first book of the ''Rigveda'' can be understood to comprise a series of riddles or enigmas which are now obscure but may have been an enigmatic exposition of the pravargya ritual. These riddles overlap in significant part with a collection of forty-seven in the Atharvaveda; riddles also appear elsewhere in Vedic texts. 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'.

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

Early narrative literature also sometimes includes riddles, prominently the ''Mahabharata