Riddles: Perspectives on the Use, Function, and Change in a Folklore Genre (review)

"What have I got in my pocket?" he said aloud. He was talking to himself, but Gollum thought it was a riddle, and he was frightfully upset.

"Not fair! Not fair!" he hissed. "It isn't fair, my precious, is it, to ask what it's got in its nassty little pocketses?"

—The Hobbit

Was Gollum right? Did Bilbo Baggins's musing question qualify as a riddle? In Tolkien's view, it did—not because it conformed to genre, but because the riddler insisted on it and the riddlee, despite initial protests, accepted it. In this case, the question is known as a "neck" riddle—one whose purpose is to save one's neck, typically invented on the spot and with an answer known only to the riddler. The classic example is Samson's riddle in Judges 14:14: "Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness." An example of another borderline riddle, cited by Kaivola-Bregenhøj, is from Archer Taylor's 1951 study (English Riddles from Oral Tradition, University of California Press) of English riddles: "Wha' live in de river?—Fish" (p. 48). Is this a riddle, or simply a question with an answer?

Problematic types, such as riddles with private answers or those barely distinguishable from ordinary questions, underscore a central problem, one that continues to haunt folkloristics long since the text/context debate has subsided. Are riddles to be defined as a folklore genre, identifiable by structural elements, or are they a rhetorical mode, identifiable by their function, their use, and the speech (or literary) context in which they appear? Are we dealing with etic or emic categories? Does folkloristic understanding depend on esoteric knowledge, or can an outsider sufficiently decipher an item's form and content and arrive at its meaning and importance? The answer to all these questions, of course, is "yes." As with all forms of folklore, we need at times to treat the forms from an etic perspective, isolating them from the emic context in which they are performed. At other times—notably when trying to decipher their cultural significance—we need to know what practitioners and participants think and feel.

Riddles, a much-needed survey, explores these questions with sufficient thoroughness to give the reader a clear view of the central issues, as well as past and present scholarship of the subject. Kaivola-Bregenhøj notes the change of riddle traditions over time, such as the transformation of the "classic" riddle form in contemporary Euro-American culture (her particular emphasis being Finland), into various joke forms, such as elephant jokes, ethnic slurs, and blond jokes. She leans heavily on Taylor's work, as well as on key essays by Robert Georges, Alan Dundes, Roger Abrahams, and Ilhan Basgöz, among others, discussing the several subgenres of riddles and their kinship with proverbs and jokes. A special study of sexual riddles leads naturally into a chapter on the contexts and functions of riddles, in which she treats of riddling situations such as contests and games, and the rules and restrictions governing riddle performance (giving and answering). The following chapters treat structures and formulas used in creating and performing riddles and the interplay between the riddler and riddlee.

The study, though extensive, is concise and by the author's admission far from exhaustive. Though this reviewer would have preferred a longer exploration, it is a welcome introduction to the field. Of particular interest are the questions Kaivola-Bregenhøj raises in the final chapter, "The Future of Riddle Research." One project she envisions harkens back to the work of Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, namely, "the establishment of an international terminology covering all the subgenres of a genre and a type index of riddles" (p. 165...