comprehension. It is not surprising that we find stories of poets measuring
themselves against one another in contests both of riddling language and of
mythological learning.
There is in fact a close affinity between the conventional metaphorical
language of poetry and that used in riddles. When a Vedic poet begins a hymn
to Agni with the announcement
Longing they roused up the longing one
like the husband of the house, the women who share a home;
the sisters relished the dark one (and) the ruddy one, (RV 1. 71. 1)the style is that of a riddle. But his fellow Rishis, and everyone who was
accustomed to these hymns and knew the conventional metaphors and
references, will have understood that the ‘sisters’ were the fingers operating
thefire-drill and exciting the flame, while the feminine dark and ruddy ones
were night and dawn.
Another hymn to Agni (10. 79) begins with several stanzas in this riddling
manner.
I saw his, the great one’s greatness, the immortal’s in mortal settlements.
In various places his jaws open and close; insatiably munching they devour much.
Hidden his head, apart his eyes; insatiable he eats the forests with his tongue...
This truth I declare to you, Heaven and Earth: the born child devours his
mothers.
His mothers (dual) are the two wooden components of the fire-drill (cf. 5. 11.
3; AV Paipp. 11. 1. 3). According to Plutarch there was a riddle in the Hesiodic
Wedding of Ceyx (fr. 267) about the child devouring its parents, that is, the fire
consuming the wood from which it was kindled. It looks as if this may have
been at least a Graeco-Aryan if not an Indo-European riddle.^73
Walter Porzig pointed out that the Vedic encoding imagery is to some
extent systematic. Things that come in pairs or sets, like the fingers in RV 1.
- 1 above, may be ‘brothers’ or ‘sisters’ (according to gender); anything
travelling through the air may be a ‘bird’; things that give nourishment may
be ‘cows’; the top of anything may be its ‘head’ and the bottom its ‘foot’.^74
Such encryption was no doubt further developed in India than in Eurostan,
though some forms of Greek poetry and the Norse skaldic tradition show
(^73) K. Ohlert, Philologus 56 (1897), 612 f., who also quotes a Faroese and a north German
riddle about the fire’s crooked father(s) and hollow mother; id. (1912), 93.
(^74) W. Porzig in Germanica, Eduard Sievers zum 75. Geburtstag (Halle/Saale 1925), 646–60,
partly anticipated by Müller (1897), 87.
- Cosmos and Canon 365