Indo-European Poetry and Myth

There is on earth a two-footed and four-footed creature with a single voice,

and three-footed, changing its form alone of all creatures that move

on earth and through the air and on the sea.

When it walks supported on the most legs,

then the strength of its limbs is feeblest.

The solution is man, who as a baby crawls on all fours and in old age uses a
stick as a third leg. This riddle has a wide currency across Europe and beyond;
it has reached Finno-Ugric peoples and Fiji.^80 It must be read against the
background of the traditional Indo-European antithesis between two-footed
and four-footed creatures (p. 100); one that belongs to both classes is
deeply paradoxical from the start. But ‘three-footed’, of the man walking with
a stick, also goes back to Indo-European riddling. We catch it in RV 10. 117. 8,

ékapa ̄d bhu ̄ ́yo dvipádo ví cakrame,

dvipa ́ ̄t tripa ́ ̄dam abhí eti pas ́ca ̄t. ́

The one-footed (= the Sun) far outsteps the two-footed ones (humans),

the two-footed catches up the three-footed from behind.

Hesiod in one of his most high-flown passages refers to a ‘three-footed man’,
not intending it as a riddle, since he adds ‘whose back is bent, and his head
looks down at the ground’, but as an inherited poetic locution (Op. 533;
cf. Aesch. Ag. 81). An early Welsh poem speaks of an old man’s staff as his
third foot.^81
Another type of riddle takes the form of a little narrative, like the ‘I saw’
ones but without the ‘I saw’. There are examples among the Exeter Book
riddles (22, 33, 46 f., 54, 86) and the Heiðreksgátur (17, 27; Edd. min. 112,
116 f.). Here is a Greek one:

αjνο ́  τ $στιν ƒ qνρ τε κο1κ qνρ

Zρνιθα κο1κ Zρνιθ, !δ.ν τε κο1κ !δ.ν

$π? ξ3λου τε κο1 ξ3λου καθημνην

λθωι τε κο1 λθωι βα ́ λοι τε κο1 βα ́ λοι.

There is a tale that a man who was no man,

seeing and not seeing a bird that was no bird

as it sat on a stock that was no stock,

hit it and hit it not with a stone that was no stone.^82

(^80) See Aarne (1918–20), ii. 3–23.
(^81) Red Book of Hergest col. 1029 = Kenneth Jackson, Early Welsh Gnomic Poems (Cardiff
1935), iii st. 30. 3 trydyd troet y hen y ffon; Clancy (2003), 113. For another family of riddles
in which ‘two-footed’, ‘three-footed’, and ‘four-footed’ have a different reference see Aarne
(1918–20), ii. 24–59.
(^82) ‘Panarces’ ap. Clearch. fr. 95 Wehrli, cf. Pl. Rep. 479bc with schol.
368 9. Cosmos and Canon