какую чудовину, ‘I saw a certain prodigy’.^76 I do not find any examples in
Schleicher’s collection of Lithuanian riddles, but there is the analogous
pattern ‘I went on my way and I found.. .’, ‘I went through the forest, I
found.. .’.^77
In another riddle attributed to the legendary Cleobulina the speaker’s
unusual apperception is not visual but auditory:
κν μηι νεκρ: Zνο με κερασφο ́ ρωι οoα #κρουσεν.
A dead ass struck my ear with its horned shank.The reference is to the notes of a Phrygian hornpipe, made from an ass’s tibia
with a cow-horn attached. The phrase ‘struck my ear’ obscures the fact that
sound is in question, but we have here a variant of the paradox that a dead
creature gives voice through a musical instrument. There are several Greek
texts that play on this idea, but it appears also in a Latvian riddle about a
goat’s horn: ‘when I was still alive, I was not able to give forth a voice; when
life was at an end, my voice began to sound’.^78 If there were Indo-European
riddles on these lines, the horn is one of the likeliest instruments to have been
their subject, beside the bone flute and the skin drum.
In the Latvian riddle the first-person pronouns and verbs refer to the thing
to be guessed: it describes itself. This is by no means a rare type. We find it in
Greek (Thgn. 257–60, Anth. Pal. 14. 2, 5, 35, 42, etc.), it is standard in the late
Latin collections of Symphosius and Aldhelm, and common in the Old Eng-
lish and Lithuanian ones. It is not clear, however, whether it is of Indo-
European antiquity. Its European distribution is compatible with a Classical
origin.
Alternatively the subject of the riddle is described in the third person. In
Greek and Old English, at least, it may be introduced by ‘there is a certain
creature that.. .’ or the like. Such is the famous riddle of the Sphinx in the
hexameter version that may have stood in the epic Oedipodea:^79
(^76) D. Sadovnikov, Zagadki Russkago naroda (St Petersburg 1901), 101 no. 987b. A similar
‘I saw’ occurs in Greek and Norse gnomic poetry, where it introduces a moral tale; cf. Thgn.
915/920, Soph. Aj. 1142/1150, Eur. El. 369, fr. 295; Hávamál 70. 4, 78. 2, 118. 2. This has Hebrew
parallels: West (1997), 521.
(^77) Schleicher (1857), 194, 196. Comparable is Heiðreksgátur2, ‘I went forth, I made an
excursion, I saw.. .’. Another phrase is ‘I know one who.. .’: Eubulus fr. 106. 16 K.–A. οjδ,
$γ., i ...; Exeter Riddle 43. 1, 49. 1, 58. 1, ic wa ̄t ...; Faroese riddle quoted by Ohlert (1912),
101, eg veit ein fugl...
(^78) Thgn. 1229 f., ‘a marine carcass that in death makes utterance with living mouth’
(a conch); cf. Hymn. Herm. 38, Soph. Ichn. 299 f.; Philitas fr. 18 Sbardella; A. J. G. Bielenstein,
1000 lettische Rätsel (Mitau 1881), no. 868.
(^79) Oedipodea fr. 2* West, from Asclepiades of Tragilos, FGrHist 12 F 7a. Other examples
of this type of opening: Antiph. fr. 194, Eubulus fr. 106, Theodectes TrGF 72 F 4; Anth. Pal. 14.
34; Exeter Riddles 50, 84.
- Cosmos and Canon 367