Riddles share a Germanic root with the verb to read
A riddle cloaks meaning in a statement or question meant to be solved—enigmas in metaphor, conundra in punning play. Archer Taylor called riddling a near-universal art across cultures from Finland to China. English riddle and read both descend from Germanic *rēdaną, “interpret” or “guess.”
From Common Germanic *rēdaną came the West Germanic noun *rādislī, a thing to be guessed, the ancestor of Old English *rǣdels as well as the German word Rätsel and its Dutch cousin raadsel. Riddles come in two families: enigmas, couched in metaphor or allegory, and conundrums, which hinge on puns. Robert Petsch made the first major modern Western definition in 1899, and Robert Georges and Alan Dundes offered a structuralist one in 1963. Antti Aarne catalogued types in 1918–20, and from the 1950s anthropologists studied how riddling helps people reframe fear and anxiety.
Some of the oldest known riddles come from Sumer, on a tablet of about 2000 BC, and Babylonian scribes copied them into schoolbooks; the most famous has the scribal school as its answer. The Sumerian term i-bi-lu may be related to Hebrew hîdāh. Hymn 164 in the first book of the Rigveda may hold the earliest surviving poetic riddles, overlapping with 47 in the Atharvaveda, and one Vedic riddle describes a twelve-spoked wheel carrying 720 sons, the months with their 360 days and nights.
In the Mahabharata a nature spirit tests Yudhishthira with the Yaksha Prashna, and Amir Khusrow, who lived from 1253 to 1325, wrote the first riddle collection in a medieval Indic language, in Hindawi verse. Dandin’s Kāvyādarśa, from the seventh or eighth century, discussed riddles as part of poetics.
Certain riddle types recur across Europe. The writing riddle calls a page a white field sown with black seeds, as in the Veronese Riddle of the eighth or ninth century. A thirteenth-century Icelandic riddle about four hanging and two pointing the way describes a cow, and the Logba people borrowed an Ewe riddle about a woman whose tank holds water she never fetched: a coconut.
Source: Riddle
