 Mystery: September 12, 2012 Issue [#5253] |
  Mystery
This week: Riddle me this Edited by: Arakun the twisted raccoon  
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Quote for the week: A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.
~Karl Kraus |
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According to Merriam-Webster's dictionary, a riddle is a mystifying, misleading, or puzzling question posed as a problem to be solved or guessed. Riddles are known from almost every culture, and some are thousands of years old.
Riddles often include a play on words or pun:
Q.When is a door not a door?
A. When it is ajar (a jar).
Many riddles are written in rhyme:
Q. A man without eyes saw cherries on a tree.
He neither took cherries nor left cherries.
How can this be?
A. There were two cherries on the tree. The man had one eye. He took one cherry and left one on the tree.
In some riddles, the solution is given in the question, but the details serve as distractions. This type is most effective when asked aloud. Here is an example:
Q. You are driving a bus in New York City. At the first stop, 15 people get on. At the second stop, 3 people get off and 5 get on. At the third stop, 8 people get off and 7 get on. At the fourth stop, 11 people get on and 8 get off. Before arriving at the last stop, 2 passengers get into a fight and are asked to get off. What color are the bus driver's eyes?
A. The same color as yours of course. The first line says "you are driving a bus".
One of the most famous riddles is the Riddle of the Sphinx from Greek mythology. The Sphinx, a monster with the head of a woman, body of a lion, and wings of an eagle, sat outside the gate of the city of Thebes and posed the following riddle to anyone who wanted to enter:
What goes on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three in the evening?
If the travellers could not answer correctly, the Sphinx ate them. The hero Oedipus finally delivered Thebes from the Sphinx by answering the riddle. His answer was "a man". The riddle is a metaphor for the stages of life. A baby crawls on all fours, and adult walks on two legs, and an old man walks with the aid of a cane. Many classic riddles are in the form of metaphors.
Riddles are common in literature. Shakespeare included several of them in his plays. In the Bible, Samson stumped the Philistines with a riddle about a lion and honey. In "The Hobbit", Gollum challenged Bilbo Baggins to a riddle competition. Bilbo won and escaped with Gollum's "precious" ring. Technically, Bilbo broke the rules by asking an ordinary question that wasn't a true riddle, but Gollum accepted it, and was forced to live with the result.
Since most riddles are mini-mysteries themselves, they go well with mystery stories. In Arthur Conan Doyle's story "The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual" Sherlock Holmes solves a long riddle in verse form.
In some stories, a riddle is used as a code describing the location of a treasure or other important object. Examples include "DaVinci Code" and the "National Treasure" movies.
In other stories, a criminal uses riddles to taunt investigators. The most obvious example of this type is the Riddler of the Batman series. Hannibal Lecter of "Silence of the Lambs" and the Deaf Man in Ed McBain's "87th Precinct" stories also love riddles and other puzzles.
Something to try: Write a mystery story that includes one or more riddles. |
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