Riddle

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[2] 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".

[24] 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.

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

[29] 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).

According to Archer Taylor, "the oldest recorded riddles are Babylonian school texts which show no literary polish".

[38][39] Hymn 164 of the first book of the Rigveda can be understood to comprise a series of riddles or enigmas[40] which are now obscure but may have been an enigmatic exposition of the pravargya ritual.

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'.

In the medieval period, however, verse riddles, alongside other puzzles and conundra, became a significant literary form in the Arabic-speaking world,[54] and accordingly in Islamic Persian culture[55] and in Hebrew — particularly in Al-Andalus.

[56] 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.

[57] Other Hebrew-writing exponents included Moses ibn Ezra, Yehuda Alharizi, Judah Halevi, Immanuel the Roman, and Israel Onceneyra.

[58] 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.

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.

[75] These riddles do, however, provide insights into Norse mythology, medieval Scandinavian social norms, and rarely attested poetic forms.

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.

A large number of riddle collections were printed in the German-speaking world and, partly under German influence, in Scandinavia.

Es kam ein Vogel federlos, saß auf dem Baume blattlos, da kam die Jungfer mundlos und fraß den Vogel federlos von dem Baume blattlos.

Tellingly, while Jonathan Swift composed at least eight verse riddles on themes such as a pen, gold, and the privy, this was seen as a lapse in taste by many of his contemporaries.

[27][81] 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.

[84] Contemporary English-language riddles typically use puns and double entendres for humorous effect,[citation needed] rather than to puzzle the butt of the joke, as in "Why is six afraid of seven?"

[86] The earliest riddles attested in Irish are generally held to be found in a short collection from the fifteenth-century Book of Fermoy.

[90] 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.

[98] 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.

[99] In the twentieth century, thousands of riddles and similar enigmas have been collected, capitalising on the large number of homophones in Chinese.

[101] 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.

[106] Wambi Cornelius Gulere wrote his doctoral project at Makerere University, titled Riddle Performance and Societal Discourses: Lessons from Busoga.

[112] However, Hieronymus Lalemant gave a fairly detailed account of a riddle-contest among the Huron around 1639 as part of a healing ritual.

[92] 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.

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.