Riddles

A riddle is a or 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. In the assessment of Elli Köngas 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'.

Defining riddles precisely is hard and has attracted a fair amount of scholarly debate. The first major modern attempt to define the riddle was by Robert Petsch in 1899, with another seminal contribution, inspired by structuralism, by Robert A. Georges and Alan Dundes in 1963. 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'.

In some traditions and contexts, riddles may overlap with proverbs. An example from a different language, 'Nothing hurts it, but it groans all the time' can be deployed as a proverb (when its referent is a hypocrite) or as a riddle (when its referent is a pig).

Much academic research on riddles has focused on collecting, cataloguing, defining and typologising riddles, with much of the key recent work done in the 1960s and 1970s. Key work on cataloguing and typologising riddles was published by Antti Aarne in 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.

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