Riddles

Riddles form an intriguing verbal genre in which ambiguity and innuendo compete to suggest, confirm, or refute solutions, which may be obscene, scatological, or innocent. Although now only marginally current and usually literary, riddles have a long history in English, the first collection being found in the Anglo-Saxon poems of the Exeter Book. Some are simply enigmatic; others finish with the formulaic question: “Ask what I am.” While most are amusing and ingenious exercises in wordplay, several are clearly bawdy, since they deal with suggestive topics such as a poker, a knife and its sheath, and with dough, which the woman makes rise and thrusts into her oven. Several knowingly invite an obscene solution but offer an innocent one, a convention which has continued to modern times. However, since the solutions were not given, this can only be a teasing but likely speculation, on which Anglo-Saxon scholarship has generally been reticent. Consider the following passages, in the translation of Michael Alexander (1966):

( a-44 ) Swings by his thigh a thing most magical!
Below the belt, beneath the folds
Of his clothes it hangs, a hole in its front end,
Stiff-set and stout, it swivels about.
Leveling the head of this hanging instrument,
Its wielder hoists his hem above the knee:
It is his will to fill a well-known hole
That it fills fully when at full length.
He has often filled it before. Now he fills it again.

( b-12 ) a dark-headed girl grabs and squeezes me,
silly with drink, and in the dark night
wets me with water, or warms me up
before the fire. Fetched between breasts
by her hot hand, while she heaves about
I must stroke her swart part.

The sexual innuendoes can hardly be disputed, which makes the conventional solutions the more knowing and suggestive, since (a) is a key and (b) is an oxhide.

Medieval lyrics have a fair number of obviously risqué riddle-poems, such as “I have a new garden” (early fifteenth century: British Museum Sloane 2593), in which a pear tree, the centerpiece of the garden, attracts unusual interest:

The fairest maid of this town
Prayed me
To graft her a graft
Of my perry tree

The metaphor of grafting then becomes clearly phallic:

And I grafted her
Right up in her home:
And twenty weeks from that day
It was alive in her womb.

A contemporary mock-riddle with an obviously phallic symbol is “I have a noble cock,” covered in the entry for cock, a richly ambiguous term in English. The Sloane manuscript has another simple riddling reference to the male genitalia:

I have a pocket for the nonce;
Therein be twain precious stones….
Withouten feet it can stand.

( Stone in Middle English also carried the meaning of “testicle,” as it still does in agricultural parlance. The riddling paradox of the penis, which can stand without feet, is fairly common in the period.)

The genre was sufficiently popular for William Caxton’s successor, Wynkyn de Worde, to publish a collection in 1525 called The Demaundes Joyous (“The Merry Riddles”), largely derived from a French collection with a similar title. A number of the riddles are obscene or scatological, making the book a pioneer in English publishing. Typical examples are the following: “What beast is it that hath her tail between her eyes? It is a cat when she licketh her arse”; “Which is the cleanliest occupation that is? That is a dauber [plasterer], for he may neither shite nor eat till he hath washed his hands”; “What time in the yeare beareth a goose most feathers? When the gander is upon her back.”

However, a comparison with the French source shows that in borrowing twenty-nine of the eighty-seven French originals, the English compiler rejected a great number of the rudest and most explicit. They include (in translation): “Which are the two best and most necessary things in a household? The prick and the cunt, for without the prick and the cunt you would never have any marriages.” “What is the most artful butcher there is? That is a cunt, for it extracts the marrow from bones without breaking them.” “How can you divide a fart into two? Put your nose in my arse; Your nostrils will divide it exactly” (Wardroper, ed., 1976, 4-5). (This last motif is developed in Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale .)

Riddles are thus a form of popular wordplay revealing a continuing interest in bawdy and obscene topics.