Riddles (A.S. rædelse, from rædan, 'to interpret'), or SENSE-RIDDLES, to adopt Dr Tylor's phrase, have been defined as 'roundabout definitions of the hearer has to guess what.' They were widely popular in dim antiquity, as to-day they are popular among many half-civilised 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 Ædipus (q.v.), 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. Of insoluble riddles Samson's is a good instance, and this which, in a Russian folk-tale, is put by 'Boots' to the princess: 'As I came to you I saw on the way what was bad, and I struck the bad with a bad thing, and of what was bad the bad died.' Naturally the princess could not guess that he had killed a snake with his lance; she gave it up, and had to marry him. Such propounding of riddles for wagers (her hand to his head in this instance) 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 Queen of Sheba, again, came to pose the wise king with enigmas ('venit tentare eum ænigmatibus, so it runs in the Vulgate); the trials of skill between Virgil's shepherds are a standard classical instance; and, to come down to later times, the Russian folk-tale has many analogues in other folklores and in our own ballad minstrelsy—e.g. in 'Proud Lady Margaret,' 'Captain Wedderburn,' and 'The Elfin Knight.'
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, and, like Samson's riddle, were generally in poetical form. 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 gríphoi. Even the greater poets did not disdain to introduce them into their writings, or to devote whole poems to the subject—e.g. the Syrinx, commonly ascribed to Theocritus. Appuleius wrote a Liber Ludicrorum et Gríphorum, but it is lost; and almost the only name we can fix upon is a certain Cælius Firmianus Symposius, whose riddles, comprising a hundred hexameter triplets, are termed by St Aldhelm 'rubish' ('carmina inepta').
The riddle, but more perhaps as an amusement for the baronial hall on winter nights, or for the monkish refectory, than as a serious intellectual effort, 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 Demaundes Joyous (1511) contains several riddles that are simply coarse jests; but others, again, well illustrate the simple faith of mediæval Christendom—e.g. 'Demand: What bare the best burden that ever was borne? Response: 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; but in France, in the 17th century, it began to creep back into favour, until at last riddles rivalled in popu- larity the madrigals and sonnets of the period. Le Père Menestrier, in 1694, wrote a grave treatise on the subject; and before that, in 1646, the Abbé Cotin had published a recueil, in the preface to which he modestly dubbed himself 'le Père de l'Enigme.' 'Posterity,' adds a French critic, 'has not recognised his paternity.' The taste for riddle-making grew and grew, and many brilliant French writers, such as Boileau, Voltaire, Madame de Deffand, and Rousseau, did a little in this line, until finally the Mercure de France became a fort-nightly repository of riddles, the solution of which secured a reputation in society. In Germany we have Schiller's delightful extravaganza, Turandot; and in England Cowper, Fox, Canning, and Praed are a few of the makers of poetical riddles or Charades (q.v.). To-day with us the riddle is a mere jeu d'esprit, a conundrum or pun couched question-wise; but among the Irish, German, and Russian peasantry, the Gypsies, the Zulus, the Samoans, and many more races, the old-fashioned sense-riddles, often enshrining a mythological germ, still hold their own. Thus, 'in the government of Pskov, on the occasion of a marriage, the bridegroom and his friends are not allowed to enter the bride's cottage until they have answered all the riddles her friends put to them; and in one of the villages in the Jaroslav government a bargain of which the bride is the subject is concluded between the groomsmen and the "seller of the bride"—riddles, answered by gestures, instead of words, taking the place of coin.'
See chap. iii. of Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871); Ralston's Songs of the Russian People (1872); two articles in Once a Week (1868); one by D. Fitzgerald in the Gentleman's Magazine (1881); Friedrich's Geschichte des Räthsel (1860); Rolland's Devinettes ou Enigmes Populaires, with a preface by Gaston Paris (1877), and a bibliography of fifty other works; and Bladé's Proverbes et Devinettes de la Gascoigne (1886).