Riddle

“ And he said unto her, Behold, I have not told it my father nor my mother, and shall I tell it thee? 14:17 And she wept before him the seven days, while their feast lasted: and it came to pass on the seventh day, that he told her, because she lay sore upon him: and she told the riddle to the children of her people.
14:18 And the men of the city said unto him on the seventh day before the sun went down, What is sweeter than honey? And what is stronger than a lion? and he said unto them, If ye had not plowed with my heifer, ye had not found out my riddle. ”

“ The word for riddle varies with the population. In Ilocano it is burburtia, in Pangasinan boniqueo, in Tagal bugtong, in Gaddang ———, in Pampangan bugtong, in Bisayan tugmahanon.
Riddles are common to all mankind. They delighted the old Aryans and the ancient Greeks as they do the modern Hindu and the Bantu peoples of darkest Africa. Many writers have defined the riddle. Friedreich in his Geschichte des Räthsels, says: “The riddle is an indirect presentation of an unknown object, in order that the ingenuity of the hearer or reader may be exercised in finding it out.... ”

“ Here are two or three specimens of the riddles of the old bards, and in riddle and saga we get most vivid pictures of the life and thoughts, the ways and words of the forefathers whom we are too ready to think of as ‘rude,’ but who are here portrayed to us as gentle, mild, and large of soul; men and women whom we, their posterity, may well delight to honour. ”

“ For the essence of a riddle is to express true facts under impossible combinations. ”

“ The Hindu calls the sun seven-horsed; so the German riddle asks—
"What is the chariot drawn by?"
"Seven white and seven black horses."
The Greek riddle of the two sisters—Day and Night. Another one given by Diog. Lært. i. 91, Athenagoras x. 451, runs—
"One is father, twelve the children, and born to each other
[128] Maidens thirty, whose twain form is parted asunder,
White to behold on the one side, black to behold on the other,
All immortal in being, all doomed to dwindle and perish." [H]
"The year, months, and days." ”

“ The idea of the Riddle books is a little group of children—three girls and three boys decide to form a riddle club. Each book is full of the adventures and doings of these six youngsters, but as an added attraction each book is filled with a lot of the best riddles you ever heard. ”

“ The writer proceeds to give an example of the riddle games as follows: “I know an animal which eats grass, has two horns on its head, a tail, and four cloven feet. What can it be? When in need of anything, it lows. ”

“ He bobbed up and down like a little red cherry, singing—
"Riddle me, riddle me, rot-tot-tote!
A little wee man, in a red red coat!
A staff in his hand, and a stone in his throat;
If you'll tell me this riddle, I'll give you a groat."
Now this riddle is as old as the hills; Mr. ”

“ Once more, the story of the Three Eyes is closely bound up with all the details of my love, not only in my recollection of it, but also in actual fact. While the riddle itself is alien to it and may be regarded solely in its aspect of a scientific phenomenon, it is impossible to describe how humanity came to know of it and was brought into immediate contact with it, without at the same time revealing all the vicissitudes of my sentimental adventure. The riddle and this adventure, from the point of view with which we are concerned, are integral parts of the same whole. ”

“ So in the old English ballad of the Elfin-knight, a maiden saves herself from an evil spirit by successfully guessing his riddles. Among many primitive peoples the game of riddle-reading was played with opposing sides, each headed by a champion, and with bets staked on the outcome. Often in ballads [Pg ix] and folklore the hero's escape from death and final triumph hinge upon the guessing of a riddle.
The Semitic people held in high regard the power to read riddles, and this power, as in the story of Solomon, blends with the higher intelligence which makes for wisdom. ”

“ Of “true riddles” there is a vast variety of form and content. Most typical is the descriptive riddle of a single object to be guessed. In its complete and normal form Petsch claims that such a riddle consists of five elements or parts. 1 Introduction; 2 denominative; 3 descriptive; 4 restraint or contrast; 5 conclusion. 1 and 5 are merely formal, trimmings; 2 and 3 are inherent and essential; 4 is common and adds vigor and interest. Such complete and “normal” Page 12riddles are rare in any language. Usually one or more of the five elements are lacking. ”

“ Group Exercise. 1. Some of the riddles may now be written on the board. Then the class will try to make them better. The teacher will write each improved riddle beside the one from which it was made.
[Pg 159]
2. When everybody in the class has made a riddle, and all the riddles have been guessed, you and the other pupils will enjoy having a circus parade. In this circus parade the whole class marches around the room and up and down the aisles. Each pupil plays, as he did in making the riddles, that he is one of the performers or one of the animals in a circus. ”

“ Religious riddles, relating to beads, bells, church, crucifixes, are common enough and are necessarily due to outside influence, but even such sometimes show a non-European attitude of mind, metaphorical expression or form of thought.
Everywhere riddles vary in quality and value. Many are stupid things, crudely conceived and badly expressed. Only the exceptional is fine. Examine any page of one of our own riddle books Page 9and you may criticize almost every riddle upon it for view-point, or form, or flavor. We must not demand more from Filipino riddles than from our own. ”

“ Riddles, as is well known, play an important part in popular story, and that from very remote times. No one needs to be reminded of Samson, Œdipus, Apollonius of Tyre. Riddle-tales, which, if not so old as the oldest of these, may be carried in all likelihood some centuries beyond our era, still live in Asiatic and European tradition, and have their representatives in popular ballads. ”

“ The attraction of the riddle for the folk mind is well known, and before the spread of cards appears to have been one of the chief forms of gambling in which even life was staked, as in the case of Samson or the Sphinx. In the Folk-Tale it often occurs in the form of the Riddle-Bride-Wager, in which a princess is married to him that can guess [258] some elaborate conundrum. The first two of Child's Ballads deal with similar riddles, and his notes are a mine of erudition on the subject: on the Clever Lass herself see his elaborate treatment, English Ballads, i., 485 seq. ”

“ A man who kept boring people with a mere ‘sell’ would be scouted; and with the death of the answerless riddle the difficult word ‘Rooky’ would die. But Mr. Max Müller says, ‘Riddles would cease to be riddles if the names had been clear and intelligible.’ The reverse is the fact. In the riddles he gives there are seldom any ‘names;’ but the epithets and descriptions are as clear as words can be:—
Who are the mother and children in a house, all having bald heads?—The moon and stars. ”

“ If we were asked the riddle how images of the eye and all the sensations of our senses could be represented by sounds, nay, could be so embodied in sounds as to express thought and excite thought, we should probably give it up as the question of a madman, who, mixing up the most heterogeneous subjects, attempted to change color into sound and sound into thought.316 Yet this is the riddle which we have now to solve. ”

“ For a folk riddle may be taken over by the learned and dressed accordingly, or vice versa, a learned riddle may pass to the folk and suffer modification to fit popular taste. Our Anglo-Saxon riddles illustrate both movements. No positive distinctions can be made, but in general the longer and more poetic may safely be called learned, notably the Storm riddles, but also for a different reason those containing runes; and the shorter (and metrically inferior ones) must be regarded as popular, notably those on simple domestic themes and the so-called obscene riddles. ”

“ This memory of more than twenty years ago, and the extraordinary thrill of the moment, were recently revived for me by the [pg 107] reading of the essay "Ultimate Questions," in the last and not least precious volume bequeathed us by the world's greatest thinker. The essay contains his final utterance about the riddle of life and death, as that riddle presented itself to his vast mind in the dusk of a lifetime of intellectual toil. ”

“ The Ballads of Riddle and Repartee do not amount to very many in our tongue. But they contain riddles which may be found in one form or another in nearly every folklore on the earth. Even Samson had a riddle. Always popular, they seem to have been especial favourites in early Oriental literature, in the mediæval Latin races, and, in slightly more modern times, amongst the Teutonic and Scandinavian peoples. Perhaps King John and the Abbot is the best English specimen, for it is to-day as pleasing to an audience as it can ever have been. ”

“ Riddles: beautiful girl not to be had by any man who cannot puzzle her father with a riddle, Gaelic tale, I, 417 b; man wins wife by instructing her how to answer her mother’s riddles, Lithuanian tale, I, 418 f.; riddles at marriages of Russian peasants, I, 418. Penalty for not guessing is life, I, 10, 14, 404-6 ”

“ What is making love but making riddles? And what else are some of our treaties, and indeed some of our laws? Even our gravestones can't tell the naked truth: tombs you see are sort of riddles! a Politician is a walking Riddle; and so is a Physician and his prescription a professed Ænigma, intended only to be solved by the Apothecary.———This being the truth, then will any man tell me, that the art of riddling is not of the utmost consequence to society? ”

“ Max Müller seems to think some proof of this process as a vera causa may be derived from ‘Folk Riddles.’
The Riddle Theory
We now come, therefore, to the author’s treatment of popular riddles (devinettes) , so common among savages and peasants. Their construction is simple: anything in Nature you please is described by a poetical periphrasis, and you are asked what it is. Thus Geistiblindr asks,
What is the Dark One
That goes over the earth,
Swallows water and wood,
But is afraid of the wind? &c.
Or we find,
What is the gold spun from one window to another? ”

“ Sing heigh ho, the carrion crow,
Fol de riddle, lol de riddle, hi ding do.
The tailor he shot and missed his mark,
Fol de riddle, lol de riddle, hi ding do,
And shot his own sow quite through the heart;
Sing heigh ho, the carrion crow,
Fol de riddle, lol de riddle, hi ding do.
Wife, bring brandy in a spoon,
Fol de riddle, lol de riddle, hi ding do,
For our old sow is in a swoon;
Sing heigh ho, the carrion crow,
Fol de riddle, lol de riddle, hi ding do.
[104]
MERRY are the bells, and merry would they ring ”

“ We have fine parties on the lawn. I cannot walk, but I can fly when I am old and white-haired. What am I?
Oral Exercise. 1. Which of Tom's three riddles do you like the best? Which do you care for least? [Pg 143] Why? Do you think the third riddle is too long? What is in the third riddle that you do not find in the second?
2. Can you make a riddle of your own about the dandelion?
3. Make riddles for your classmates to guess, about flowers, birds, and animals that are seen in the spring.
Written Exercise. Write on paper the best riddle of a bird or a flower that you can make. ”

“ The first of them is not in prose or verse, it is not a work of theology or philosophy or science or art or history or fiction or general literature. It is at once the most comprehensive and impartial book I know. This paragraph is assuming the aspect of a riddle. Being in a mild and passionless way a lover of my species, I am a loather of riddles. So I will go{31} no further on the downward way, but declare the name, title, and style of my book to be Nuttall’s Standard Dictionary. ”

“ Sar-nerra heard the word which the wise son of man
14. asked, and all the gods he sent to:
15. Friends are ye I am unable? . . . . to you
After this there is a mutilated passage containing the names, titles, and actions of the gods who consider the riddle. It is evident that it is air or wind which the wise man means in his riddle, for this is everywhere, and in its sounds imitates the cries of animals.
Next we have another single fragment about a person named Sinuri, who uses a divining rod to ascertain the meaning of a dream. ”

“ The riddle of America rises before him and the desire of finding an answer to it turns him from his former studies. For America is a true riddle to Europeans. These thirty years not only the United States, but even smaller American countries like Brazil and Argentina, have impressed themselves sharply upon the attention of Europe. The Old World has been compelled to recognize that America has in her turn become a mighty historic force; and that she exercises an influence on the Old World which grows continuously greater. ”

“ Time wherein we could be and think and dream all that each busy, hugger-mugger, feverish, precipitate twenty-four hours would not allow us to be or to think or dream. Impracticable, infatuate desire! We desired to muse, to brood, to meditate, to embark (with a buoyant cargo) upon that quiet stream men call reverie. We had all but forgotten how even to sleep. We lay like Argus of nights with all our hundred eyes ajar.
There were books we should never now be able to read; speculations we should never be able to explore; riddles we should never so much as hear put, much less expounded. ”

“ RIDDLES (A.S. raedan, to interpret) , probably the oldest extant form of humour. They spring from man's earliest perception that there are such things as analogies in nature. Man observes an example of analogy, puts his observations in the form of a question, and there is the riddle ready made. Some Boeotian humorist, for example, detected the analogy between the life of humanity—the child on all fours, the man erect, on two legs, old age with its staff-on one side, and on the other the conception of an animal with a varying number of limbs. ”