I have always enjoyed riddles. I'll never forget Frank Gorshin as The Riddler in the old Batman television series that starred Adam West. The Joker was too comical for my tastes, and Heath Ledger certainly changed all that, but back then The Riddler was the coolest villain. He was every bit as campy as Caesar Romero's Joker, but he had a certain style that kept you enthralled. So today i'd like to write about riddles.
Probably best to start with a definition: A riddle is a statement or question having a double or veiled meaning, put forth as a puzzle to be solved. Sounds a lot like your relationship, doesn't it? Anyway, there are two types riddles, enigmas and conundrums. Enigmas are problems generally expressed in metaphorical or allegorical language that require ingenuity and careful thinking for their solution. Conundrums are questions relying for their effects on punning in either the question or the answer.
Riddles have a distinguished literary ancestry, although the contemporary sort of conundrum that passes under the name of "riddle" may not make this obvious. In the Anglo-Saxon world of the Norsemen, the wis (wise) had wisdom due to their wit – their ability to conciliate and mediate by maintaining multiple perspectives, which has degenerated into a species of comedy, but was not always a mere laughing matter. This wit was taught with a form of oral tradition called the riddle, a collection of which were bound, along with various other gnomic verses and maxims ca. 800 A.D and deposited in Exeter Cathedral in the eleventh century - the so-called Exeter Book, one of the most important collection of Old English manuscripts which has survived.
Riddles served an abstract role in Anglo-Saxon education. They taught their listeners how to track two or more meanings at once in a single semantic situation. The pre-Christian Anglo-Saxons were not inhabiting a thought-world lacking in subtlety and complexity. They were a very intelligent race. There are at least eighteen distinct Anglo-Saxon words describing aspects of cognitive skill. The god Odin was a master of riddle lore, and sparred with several of his foes using contests of riddles.
But riddles were not exclusive to the Anglo-Saxons and Old Norse; they are an ancient and ubiquitous cultural phenomenon. Oedipus killed the Sphinx by grasping the answer to the riddle it posed; Samson outwitted the Philistines by posing a riddle about the lion and the beehive. In both cases, riddles, far from being mere child’s play, are made to decide matters of life and death.
Aristotle considered riddles important enough to include discussion of their use in his Rhetoric. He describes the close relationship between riddles and metaphors: “Good riddles do, in general, provide us with satisfactory metaphors; for metaphors imply riddles, and therefore a good riddle can furnish a good metaphor”
Riddles are brain food. Here are some appetizers for you. The answers are at the bottom.
1. What gets wetter and wetter the more it dries?
2. You throw away the outside and cook the inside. Then you eat the outside and throw away the inside. What did you eat?
3. What can you catch but not throw? (This one should be easy.)
4. What goes around the world but stays in a corner?
5. I can run but not walk. Wherever I go, thought follows close behind. What am I?
6. Give me food, and I will live; give me water, and I will die. What am I?
Did you get any of them? Here are the answers:
1. A towel.
2. An ear of corn.
3. A cold.
4. A stamp.
5. A nose.
6. Fire.
