Enigmata

Is this a riddle I see before me?

The type of rhyming riddle poetry that Swift and Tolkien wrote is one of the modern successors to the English riddling tradition. And the riddles that I have written for Enigmata are all in this style. The subtitle to the book, “following in the tradition of Symphosius, Aldhelm and Tolkien”, plots that route through history. But it isn't the only route. Tolkien's riddles are not the only kind of modern English riddle.

What even is a riddle?

The word has been used to describe quite a range of things. Any definition that is narrow enough to have much use risks excluding things that people refer to as riddles, and any definition broad enough to include all riddles will include a lot of other things too.

Even if we take the broadest view, riddles always seem to have a puzzling description and a hidden answer.

Some are written as poems, some as questions, some as short statements, some as short stories. Those stylistic differences don't make or unmake a riddle, but the underlying mechanics might.

That's a maths question. You could call it a puzzle. I wouldn't personally call it a riddle, but it has a puzzling description and a hidden answer. The shoe fits. And if you try to work it out, you'll find that it's a sneaky maths question. It's arguably more riddle-y than is typical for questions written in that style.

Generally speaking, people don't tend to refer to maths questions as riddles, but logic puzzles are often called riddles. A riddle with a fork in the road or a guard who only tells lies has more in common with a maths question than it does with a rude poem about an onion in the Exeter Book.

If we wanted to exclude logic puzzles from our definition, we'd have to tweak the bit about “a puzzling description”. Left untweaked, we might even find that we have to accept trivia questions as riddles, along with the logic puzzles and the maths problems. The characteristic that separates Symphosius's, Aldhelm's and Tolkien's riddles from these other puzzles is wordplay.

The traditional English riddle uses words and their meanings to obscure and misdirect. Some riddles have a single overarching metaphor. One of Tolkien's riddles works like this and it appears to be related to this folk riddle:

Tolkien's version has a few extra lines that add to the same metaphor. The Sumerian riddle is another example with multiple clues and one overarching metaphor.

The Sphinx's riddle isn't so simple. The wordplay is there in the idea that the answer changes the number of feet that it has. That isn't literally true. The riddle uses a single metaphor, but the answer itself is not described as if it were something else.

There are various other techniques that riddles use and sometimes they use more than one. A lot of riddles depend on words that have multiple meanings, and often they are used to draw attention to apparent contradictions.

A narrower definition that excluded the logic puzzles might say that a riddle uses wordplay to disguise a hidden answer. But what about the hidden answer? There are riddles that test the boundaries of this definition there too.

In Macbeth, the witches conjure three apparitions that give Macbeth enigmatic prophecies. The second apparition says this:

The prophecy is meant to be deceptive and it uses wordplay. There is a surface meaning: that no one can harm Macbeth. And there is a concealed meaning: that Macduff, who was born by caesarian section, actually can harm Macbeth.

Macbeth doesn't know that he is being deceived, so he takes the prophecy at face value. For him the prophecy isn't a puzzle.

Even if Macbeth had known that he was being deceived and had attempted to decipher the prophecy, even if it had been posed to him as a puzzle to solve, it still doesn't have an answer. For something to have a hidden answer there must be a question. Some riddles are posed as questions and some describe the answer with an implicit, “what am I?”

The hidden meaning in the prophecy is the deception itself. The deception does not point to something else.

In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the Mad Hatter asks Alice, “why is a raven like a writing desk?” Unlike Macbeth's prophecy, this is posed as a question and it feels like a riddle. It's remembered as an unanswerable riddle, but is an unanswerable riddle really a riddle? Lewis Carroll later confirmed that there never was an answer.

I think it's reasonable to make a distinction between a riddle that stands alone and a riddle that was created to exist in a work of fiction. This latter category, the diegetic riddle, should be given some leeway. If a riddle's primary audience is a character and not the reader, it only needs to appear to follow the rules. But as soon as someone treats it like a riddle in the real world, it is fair to ask whether or not it can survive as a riddle outside of the story.

Our definition demands a hidden answer and Carroll did not have an answer, but we never said that it had to be hidden intentionally. Someone came up with “Poe wrote on both”, which certainly works. Carroll himself eventually added his own answer: “Because it can produce a few notes, though they are very flat; and it is nevar put with the wrong end in front!”

Now that it has an answer, is it retroactively made a riddle? Was it a riddle all along, but until someone discovered an answer we didn't have a way to be sure? Shroedinger's Riddle then?

In fact, we know that it has at least two acceptable answers. We wanted “a hidden answer”, not “some hidden answers”. Is it OK for a riddle to have multiple valid answers?

Hamlet contains a question that could be interpreted as a riddle. That word is never used in the text, but it is posed by one character to another in the manner of a riddle.

The clue in the question does depend on the meaning of words. What does it mean to build something that is strong? There is a kind of metaphor or deception in the use of the word "build". Maybe that's enough, maybe it isn't.

Regardless, I don't think it has a single unequivocal answer. The first guess given in the text is “gallows-maker.” There is nothing in the riddle to say that this is wrong. And perhaps there are other answers that are better than the accepted one. What about a monarch who builds an alliance? In medieval Denmark, a Christian country, couldn't someone have argued that God had built the Earth to be stronger than anything else built on it or into it?

It isn't common for a riddle to have multiple correct answers on purpose, but other sorts of puzzles do. Accidentally having multiple correct answers is different. At the very least, if an answer is to be judged correct or incorrect, it's probably best to have a way to make a decision that everyone can agree on.

This points to a different distinction, this time not between a riddle and a non-riddle, but between a good riddle and a bad riddle.

For the sake of pursuing other modern-day English riddles that follow in the same tradition as Tolkien's rhyming riddle poetry, I think it's enough to acknowledge that wordplay and a hidden answer are important components of the riddles in that tradition.

• Next: Part 5 – Dismantling the words
• Here: Part 4 – Is this a riddle I see before me?
• Back: Part 3 – Rhyme and relatability