Whereas previously researchers had tended to take riddles out of their social performance contexts, the rise of anthropology in the post-War period encouraged more researchers to study the social role of riddles and riddling. In the case of ancient riddles recorded without solutions, considerable scholarly energy also goes into proposing and debating solutions.
Key work on cataloguing and typologising riddles was published by Antti Aarne in 1918–20, and by Archer Taylor. Much academic research on riddles has focused on collecting, cataloguing, defining, and typologising riddles. 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). In some traditions and contexts, riddles may overlap with proverbs. There are many possible sub-sets of the riddle, including charades, droodles, and some jokes. 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". The first major modern attempt to define the riddle in modern Western scholarship was by Robert Petsch in 1899, with another seminal contribution, inspired by structuralism, by Robert A. Definitions ĭefining riddles precisely is hard and has attracted a fair amount of scholarly debate. From this comes Dutch raadsel, German Rätsel, and Old English * rǣdels, the latter of which became modern English riddle. From this verb came the West Germanic noun * rādislī, literally meaning 'thing to be guessed, thing to be interpreted'. The modern English word riddle shares its origin with the word read, both stemming from the Common Germanic verb * rēdaną, which meant 'to interpret, guess'. 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". : 3 Many riddles and riddle-themes are internationally widespread.
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.Īrcher 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. A riddle is a statement, question or phrase having a double or veiled meaning, put forth as a puzzle to be solved.
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