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 conundrums, 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".Elli Köngäs Maranda, "Riddles and Riddling: An Introduction", The Journal of American Folklore, 89 (1976), 127–37 (p. 131); ; ; cf. Hannah Burrows, "Wit and Wisdom: The Worldview of the Old Norse-Icelandic Riddles and their Relationship to Eddic Poetry", in Eddic, Skaldic, and Beyond: Poetic Variety in Medieval Iceland and Norway, ed. by Martin Chase (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), pp. 114–35 (p. 116).
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" or "guess". From this verb came the West Germanic noun *rādislī, literally meaning "thing to be guessed" or "thing to be interpreted". From this comes Dutch raadsel, German Rätsel, and Old English *rǣdels, the latter of which became modern English riddle."Riddle, n. 1", Oxford English Dictionary Online, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
Definitions
Defining riddles precisely is hard and has attracted a fair amount of scholarly debate. The first major modern attempt to define the riddle within Western scholarship was by Robert Petsch in 1899,Petsch, Robert. "Neue Beitrëge zur Kenntnis des Volksrätsels", Palaestra, 4 (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 subsets of the riddle, including charades, droodles, and some jokes.
In some traditions and contexts, riddles may overlap with proverbs.John C. Messenger, Jr. 1960. "Anang Proverb-Riddles". The Journal of American Folklore Vol. 73, No. 289: pp. 225–235. . .Finnegan, Ruth. Oral Literature in Africa. The Saylor Foundation, 1982. p. 418.Umoh, S. J. 2007. "The Ibibio Proverb—Riddles and Language Pedagogy". International Journal of Linguistics and Communication 11(2), 8–13. 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).Alan Dundes, "On the Structure of the Proverb", in Analytic Essays in Folklore, ed. by Richard Dorson (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), pp. 103–8.Matti Kuusi, "Southwest African Riddle-proverbs. Proverbium: Bulletin d’information sur les recherches parémiologiques". (1969) 12: 305–11. Some consider riddles to be a subcategory for the literature.William W. Hallo, The World's Oldest Literature: Studies in Sumerian Belles-Lettres (Culture and History of the Ancient Near East 35). Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, vol. 74, no. 2, 2011. (pp. 309–11). ; Whereas, one of earliest definitions identified the riddle as a form of metaphor, first likely ascribed by Aristotle, where he states that "metaphors imply riddles", in this classical tradition fall definitions similar to one proposed by Gaston Paris, in which he defines the riddle as "a metaphor or a group of metaphors, the employment of which has not passed into common use, and the explanation of which is not self-evident."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.
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.Archer Taylor, A Bibliography of Riddles, Folklore Fellows Communications, 126 (Helsinki, 1939). In the case of ancient riddles recorded without solutions, considerable scholarly energy has also gone into proposing and debating solutions.E.g. Patrick J. Murphy, Unriddling the Exteter Riddles (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011).
Whereas previously researchers had tended to take riddles out of their social performance contexts, the rise of anthropology in the 1950s and 1960s encouraged more researchers to study the social role of riddles and riddling,E.g. David Evans, "Riddling and the Structure of Context", The Journal of American Folklore, 89 (1976), 166–88; ; ; Annikki Kaivola-Bregenhøj, Riddles: Perspectives on the Use, Function, and Change in a Folklore Genre , Studia Fennica, Folkloristica, 10 (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2001), . highlighting their role in re-orienting reality in the face of fear and anxiety. However, wide-ranging studies of riddles have tended to be limited to Western countries, with Asian and African riddles being relatively neglected.A. A. Seyed-Gohrab, Courtly Riddles: Enigmatic Embellishments in Early Persian Poetry (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2010), 14–18.
Riddles have also attracted linguists, often studying riddles from the point of view of semiotics;Elli Köngäs Maranda, "Riddles and Riddling: An Introduction", The Journal of American Folklore, 89 (1976), 127–37 (pp. 135–37); ; .Claudia Schittek, Die Sprach- und Erkenntnisformen der Rätsel (Stuttgart: M und P, Verlag für Wissenschaft und Forschung, 1991): ; . 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.Mercedes Salvador-Bello, Isidorean Perceptions of Order: The Exeter Book Riddles and Medieval Latin Enigmata, Medieval European Studies, 17 (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2015).Corinne Dale, The Natural World in the Exeter Book Riddles (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2017).James Paz, Nonhuman Voices in Anglo-Saxon Literature and Material Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017).Erin Sebo, In Enigmate: The History of a Riddle, 400–1500 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2018).
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".Dorvlo, Kofi. "Ewe borrowings into Logba." International Journal of Bilingualism 18.4 (2014): 428-446. 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.p. 266. Davenport, William. 1952. Fourteen Marshallese Riddles. The Journal of American Folklore Vol. 65, No. 257, pp. 265-266.
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.Antti Aarne, Vergleichende Rätselforschungen, 3 vols, Folklore Fellows Communications, 26–28 (Helsinki/Hamina: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1918–20), I 35–73. 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; . .Helen Price, Human and NonHuman in Anglo-Saxon and British Postwar Poetry: Reshaping Literary Ecology (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Leeds, 2013), pp. 92–128.
Year-riddle The year-riddle is found across Eurasia.Antti Aarne, Vergleichende Rätselforschungen, 3 vols, Folklore Fellows Communications, 26–28 (Helsinki/Hamina: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1918–20), I 74–178. For example, a riddle in the Sanskrit Rig Veda, from around 1500–1000 BCE, describes a 'twelve-spoked wheel, upon which stand 720 sons of one birth' (i.e. the twelve months of the year, which together supposedly have 360 days and 360 nights).Frederick Tupper, Jr, "Originals and Analogues of the Exeter Book Riddles", Modern Language Notes, 18.4 (April 1903), 97–106 (p. 102). .
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.
Four Hang; Two Point the Way An example of Four Hang; Two Point the Way, to which the pre-eminent solution is 'cow'Antti Aarne, Vergleichende Rätselforschungen, 3 vols, Folklore Fellows Communications, 26–28 (Helsinki/Hamina: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1918–20), II 60–172. 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.Antti Aarne, Vergleichende Rätselforschungen, 3 vols, Folklore Fellows Communications, 26–28 (Helsinki/Hamina: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1918–20), III 3–48. 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.Jón Árnason, Íslenzkar gátur, skemtanir, vikivakar og Þulur, I (Kaupmannahöfn: Hið Íslenzka bókmenntafélag, 1887), http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/IcelOnline/IcelOnline-idx?type=HTML&rgn=DIV2&byte=187436. Here, a snowflake falls from the sky, and is blown off the wall by the wind.
Riddle-traditions by region The riddle was at times a prominent literary form in the ancient and medieval world, 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.
Mesopotamia