riddle, deliberately enigmatic or ambiguous question requiring a thoughtful and often witty answer. The riddle is a form of guessing game that has been a part of the folklore of most cultures from ancient times. Western scholars generally recognize two main kinds of riddle: the descriptive riddle and the shrewd or witty question.
The descriptive riddle usually describes an animal, person, plant, or object in an intentionally enigmatic manner, to suggest something different from the correct answer. “What runs about all day and lies under the bed at night?” suggests “A dog,” but the answer is “A shoe.” The description usually consists of one general and one specific element. The general element stands first and is to be understood metaphorically. Thus, in this English rhyming riddle
Little Nancy Etticoat
In a white petticoat
And a red nose:
The longer she stands
The shorter she grows
a girl seems to be described. The second element, to be understood literally, appears to contradict the first. Nancy Etticoat grows shorter the longer she stands because she is a lighted candle. An apparently late development is the use of puns: e.g., “What’s black and white and red all over?”—“A newspaper,” in which both “red” and “all over” are to be understood also in the sense of “read” and “everywhere,” respectively.
Descriptive riddles deal with appearance, not function. Thus, an egg is “A little white house without door or window,” not something to eat or something from which a chicken hatches. Paradoxical riddles provide descriptions in terms of action. Common examples of these are: “What grows bigger the more you take from it?”—“A hole”; and “The man who made it did not want it; the man who bought it did not use it; the man who used it did not know it”—“A coffin.”
Descriptive riddles are universal, but they rarely occur in folktales or ballads. An unusual example of one in a folktale is that asked by the Sphinx, the monster that terrorized the Boeotian Thebans of ancient Greece: “What has one voice, and walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening?” The answer was given by Oedipus: “A man, who crawls on all fours in infancy, walks on two feet when grown, and leans on a staff when aged.”
Lacking a generic name in English, shrewd or witty questions are classed with riddles. They are of ancient origin. A classical Greek example that has been widely translated is “What is the strongest of all things?”—“Love: iron is strong, but the blacksmith is stronger, and love can subdue the blacksmith.”
Shrewd questions may be classified by subject and form. Those dealing with letters of the alphabet, words, and symbols are generally statements calling for interpretation: e.g., “ICUR YY 4 me” (“I see you are too wise for me”); “What is in the middle of Paris?”—“R”; “Spell ‘dry grass’ with 3 letters?”—“Hay.” The influence of the classroom in such riddles (sometimes called “catch riddles”) is clear.
Questions such as “What is the difference between . . . and . . . ?” or “Why is . . . like . . . ?” usually contain puns and are probably modern. Such catch questions as these seem to be known only in Western cultures. See also Exeter Book.