Riddles
or QUESTION PUZZLES.
They were widely popular in dim antiquity, as today they are popular among many half-civilized races-not absolute savages, for to perceive an analogy demands some measure of culture. They may be broadly divided into two classes -riddles admitting of more or less easy solution, and riddles whose solution is beyond any wit of man, unless indeed, as is very often the case, the answer is known already. To the former class belong the enigma propounded by the Sphinx to Edipus, and that which, according to Plutarch, Homer died of chagrin at not being able to answer. It seems to us easy now, for it was the one about the two boys who went hunting: all they caught they flung away, and all they could not catch they carried home. Propounding of riddles for wagers meets us frequently. Josephus relates how Solomon and Hiram, King of Tyre, once had a contest, in which Solomon first won a large sum of money from Hiram, but presently lost it all back to Hiram's subject Abdemon
The riddle is found in the Koran, and several collections of riddles exist in Arabic and Persian. They were, it seems, also known to the ancient Egyptians, while among the Greeks they were allied in the earliest times with the oracular responses. But in Greece they first came into vogue about the time of the "Seven Sages," one of whom, Cleobulus, was celebrated for the composition of metrical griphoi. Apuleius wrote a "Bock of Jokes and Riddles," but it is lost.
The riddle was much cultivated during the Middle Ages. Many French, English, and German riddle-books exist in MS., and some were printed at an early period. Wynkyn de Worde's "Joyous RIDEAU Questions" (1511) contains several riddles that are simply coarse jests; but others, simple faith of mediæval Christendom -e. g., "Demand:
What bare the best burden that ever was The ass that carried our Lady when she fled with our Lord into Egypt." The Reformation checked, if it did not wholly stop, the merry pastime of riddle-making time of riddle-making; but in France, in began to creep back into favor, till at last riddles rivaled in and sonnets of the period. Le Père Menestrier, in 1694, wrote a grave treatise on the subject.
The taste for riddle -making grew and many brilliant French writers, , Madame du Deffand, and Rousseau, did a little in this line. In Germany we have Schiller's de- "Turandot," and in England Cowper, Fox, Canning, and Praed are a few of the makers of poetical riddles or charades.
Today with us the riddle is a mere jeu d'esprit, a conundrum -wise; but among the Irish, German, and Russian peasantry, Samoans, and many more races, the oldfashioned senseriddles, often enshrining a mythological germ, still hold their own.