Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn's 1638 The Wedding of Samson, depicting Samson (right of centre) posing Samson's riddle
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A riddle is a statement, question or phrase having a double or veiled meaning, put forth as a puzzle to be solved. Riddles are of two types: enigmas, which are problems generally expressed in metaphorical or allegorical language that require ingenuity and careful thinking for their solution, and conundra, which are questions relying for their effects on punning in either the question or the answer.
Archer Taylor says that "we can probably say that riddling is a universal art" and cites riddles from hundreds of different cultures including Finnish, Hungarian, American Indian, Chinese, Russian, Dutch and Filipino sources amongst many others.[1]: 3 Many riddles and riddle-themes are internationally widespread.
In the assessment of Elli Köngäs-Maranda (originally writing about Malaitian riddles, but with an insight that has been taken up more widely), whereas myths serve to encode and establish social norms, "riddles make a point of playing with conceptual boundaries and crossing them for the intellectual pleasure of showing that things are not quite as stable as they seem" — though the point of doing so may still ultimately be to "play with boundaries, but ultimately to affirm them".[2]
^Cite error: The named reference :1 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^Elli Köngäs Maranda, "Riddles and Riddling: An Introduction", The Journal of American Folklore, 89 (1976), 127–37 (p. 131); doi:10.2307/539686; JSTOR 539686; cf. Hannah Burrows, "Wit and Wisdom: The Worldview of the Old Norse-Icelandic Riddles and their Relationship to Eddic Poetry", in Eddic, Skaldic, and Beyond: Poetic Variety in Medieval Iceland and Norway, ed. by Martin Chase (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), pp. 114–35 (p. 116).
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