Riddling Tales from around the World (review)

Abstract

Riddling Tales from around the World. Selected by Marjone Dundas. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002. 226 pp. This anthology contains 79 riddle tales taken mainly from collections of folktales published in English during the past 50 years. In the preface, Dundas explains that for many years she had combed folktale collections looking for riddle tales, seldom finding more than one or two in any single book. She has grouped the tales into thirteen chapters that more or less correspond to tale types: for example, Clever-Manka-type tales (AT 875, The Clever Peasant Girl); Puzzling Language (AT 875 again or AT 921, The King and the Peasant's Son); Making a Riddle from Ones Adventures (AT 851, The Princess Who Can Not Solve the Riddle); Debate in Sign Language (AT 924); Answer the Riddle or Face Death (AT 927, Out-Riddling the Judge); Dilemma Tales; The Abbot of Canterbury (AT 922); The Devil's Riddle (AT 812); and Riddles in Ballads (Child nos. 1-3, 45, 46). The juxtaposition of similar tales demonstrates the effect that subtle differences make to a common story line. Each chapter ends with remarks that might stimulate group discussion. The texts are pleasant to read and most of them would be suitable for retelling aloud. This would be an enjoyable book for people who like riddle tales, or to introduce people who like folktales in general to the variety of riddle tales. It would be useful for teachers who read or tell tales to their classes (I would also recommend George Shannon's 1985 Stories to Solve, Folktales from Around the World). Although most of Dundas's riddling tales come from oral tradition, she includes some from literary sources (e.g., the Gesta Romanorum and ancient Indian literature). However, the most famous riddle contests in literature are missing: Samson's riddle to the Philistines, Oedipus and the sphinx, the series of riddles in the Norse Hervarer Saga, and the Queen of Sheba's challenge to King Solomon, for example. The book avoids gruesome and sexually explicit tales, such as that of the woman who, having suckled her father through prison bars to save him from starvation, describes herself as both his daughter and his mother (see Archer Taylor's Straparola's Riddle of Pero and Cimon and its Parallels in Romance Philology 1 [1948]: 297-303). The format of Riddling Tales, which has a preface, introduction, notes, and index, might suggest that it was intended to be useful to scholars. Unfortunately, the content of these sections does not fulfill any such expectation. The introduction merely describes the themes of the chapters and gives a couple of examples of tales not included, without giving a rationale for exclusion. The endnotes provide sources (as do a seven-page acknowledgments section and a line after each tale), but these are merely the immediate sources. Because many of the tales were taken from collections with no such information, the original published source for a given tale can be impossible to find. The endnotes provide tale type and motif numbers, but nothing else anywhere in the book indicates that riddles or riddle tales have been subjects of productive study for folklorists and literary scholars. Dundas presents herself as self-taught and never pretends to have any academic interest in these tales. …