often appear as serious tests upon which weighty consequences hang, even
matters of life and death. It may be that a hero has to answer a riddle posed by
a supernatural creature, such as the Sphinx in the Oedipus saga, or Baba Yaga
or a water nymph in Slavonic legends. He may, to win the hand of a princess,
be required to solve a riddle posed by her or her father, or himself to pose one
that she cannot answer. Riddles play an important role in stories of contests
between poets or seers of the kind described at the end of Chapter 1. Besides
the examples mentioned there we may cite the young priest As
̇
t
̇a ̄vakra’s
challenge to the wise Bandin in the Maha ̄bha ̄rata, and the contest between
Marbán and Dael Duiled the ollam of Leinster.^71
Sometimes these intellectual duels involve difficult questions that are
not exactly riddles but call for special knowledge or mantic insight. I have
mentioned the type ‘what is the best thing for mortals?’, where an answer is
required that is not banal but at least thought-provoking. Yudhis
̇
t
̇hira’s test-
ing by a supernatural being who guards a lake (MBh. 3. 297) involves his
answering a long series of questions, some of which are true riddles but most
of which are theological and ethical, a veritable catechism. Odin’s contest
with Vafthrudnir is an examination of the giant’s deep knowledge of cosmo-
logical and cosmogonic myth; he is finally defeated when asked what Odin
whispered into Baldr’s ear before he mounted the pyre, a secret known only
to Odin himself.
In the Hesiodic Melampodia the seer Mopsus defeated Calchas by success-
fully answering the question how many figs there were on a tree in front of
them; or, according to Pherecydes of Athens (fr. 142 Fowler), how many
piglets a pregnant sow was carrying. (He not only gave the correct number,
ten, but specified that one of them was female.) The same problem is posed in
riddle form by Gestumblindi in his contest with King Heidrek: ‘What is that
wonder that I saw out there before Delling’s doors? Ten tongues it has, twenty
eyes, forty feet; that creature moves hard.’ Heidrek replies correctly that it is
a sow with nine piglets inside her, and the sow is killed to verify the number.^72
A similar feat is attributed to a Russian seer.
The more typical riddle is one that requires for its solution not private
knowledge or second sight but intelligence, lateral thinking, and expertise in
metaphor. We saw in Chapter 2 that the Indo-European poet was master of a
special language and style that often obscured the plain identity of things
under periphrases and symbols, a language that was in fact sometimes
‘riddling’, presenting to hearers unfamiliar with the code a challenge to
(^71) MBh. 3. 133 f.; Tromdám Guaire lines 868–900 Joynt, paraphrased in Thurneysen (1921),
263 f. and Dillon (1946), 94 f.
(^72) Edd. min. 110 st. 12; Hervarar saga 10 p. 49 Tolkien.
364 9. Cosmos and Canon