Riddle is a question or statement that contains a deliberately hidden meaning. Riddles today are usually meant to be amusing. They often take the form of a conundrum, a kind of riddle that depends on puns. A typical riddle of this type is: “What has four wheels and flies?” The answer, “A garbage truck,” makes sense when we realize that the word flies has two meanings.
Loading the player...Rhyming riddle
Another popular type of riddle depends on possible but unexpected assumptions in a given question. The answer to the riddle, “Where does an elephant go when he wants to lie down?” is “Anywhere he pleases.” That answer is both humorous and surprising because the question seems to concern the habits of elephants, but it is really about the intimidating size of elephants.
For many centuries, the riddle was often regarded as a kind of coded message that came from divine inspiration. People believed the message could be understood only by persons equipped with special knowledge. In ancient Greece, priests and priestesses called oracles frequently expressed their messages in the form of riddles (see Oracle ). The most celebrated riddle in Greek mythology was asked of the citizens of Thebes by the Sphinx: “What has one voice and becomes four-footed, two-footed, and three-footed?” The hero Oedipus solved the riddle. He correctly answered, “Man, who crawls on all fours as a baby, then walks on two legs as an adult, and finally needs a cane in old age.”
During the Middle Ages, from about the A.D. 400’s through the 1400’s, poets in Europe seem to have particularly enjoyed composing riddles. The so-called Exeter Book contains nearly 100 examples of riddles. They were written in an early form of English called Old English, probably in the early 700’s. These riddles dealt with such subjects as storms, ships, beer, books, and falcons. The answers to some of these riddles are obvious, but other riddles are extremely difficult to understand. However, they are valuable for the insights they provide into the way people of that period regarded events of nature and everyday life.
Collections of riddles were among the first books ever printed for popular entertainment. A book of riddles called Amusing Questions was published in England in 1511 by a printer called Wynkyn de Worde. Many standard nursery rhymes, such as “Humpty Dumpty,” are actually riddles that were invented centuries ago.
