Solutions to Riddles

Abstract

AMONG THE MANY GENRES OF FOLKLORE, the riddle is the most amenable to semiotic inquiry. In short dialogue sequences, riddling includes verbal metaphors, interpretations, and their rejections or validations. The immediate succession of a message, a decoding, and a feedback condenses a process that extends over a longer span of time in the communication process of many other genres. Moreover, inherent in the riddle is a deliberate ambiguity which is designed to reveal and conceal its subject at one and the same time. Success in untangling the true meaning of the riddle-sentence from the knots of verbal deceit depends upon the confirmation of the solution by the riddle poser. However, his acceptance of the answers is often whimsical and manipulative; he can reject certain solutions on one occasion and acknowledge them the next time, as long as he is able to maintain his socially advantageous position.' Such social manipulations of truth demonstrate an important attribute of the riddle, its capacity for multiple solutions.2 There is no single valid answer to the riddle; neither is there a single, objective, true solution to its puzzle. Each question has a range of alternate possible solutions, each of which could adequately correspond to a metaphoric description, and all of them combined would be a set of referents. Such a view implies that, from a broad cultural perspective, there are no wrong answers to riddles. Each solution can be valid as long as it is offered by a native speaker of the language who shares the cultural experience of the community and has an adequate familiarity with traditional knowledge. Yet this broad interpretation of truth in riddles should not ignore the fact that, in actual performance, there are linguistic and cultural