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riddles page.">Why is a riddle a riddle? Nowadays we hear it thrown around all over the media when discussing the unknown in any regard. It's also common to hear it when referring to funny pun questions for kids: What time do you go to the dentist? You go at tooth-thirty. The final way we hear about it (the most accurate way) is when we hear any statement or question that has several meanings and is meant to be answered. None of these ways of using the word are really worse than any of the others, they are all culturally acceptable. But one of the definitions (the most accurate one) has roots running deep into history. Riddles haven't always had so many definitions, but it has changed as they have become more popular. Like most short poetic chunks, riddles have been enjoyed for thousands of years. They go back to before the time of the Greeks and the writing of the Bible. Both the literature of the Greeks and the contents of the bible contain fairly advanced riddles. This puts riddles to go back as far as 1000 BC or so. A riddle often claimed to be the oldest, "As I Was Going To St. Ives", is actually based on a math problem written in 1650 BC. But this problem wasn't supposed to be a riddle and the riddle form wasn't written until much later. Riddles we're used to provide entertainment like they still are today, but they were also used to explain large concepts. Aristotle actually described them as being important to rhetoric because they can explain concepts in a way that could be directly explained. The next great age for riddles was the Anglo-Saxon time period (5th to 12th century). During this time riddles almost degraded in meaning. Most of the riddles of this time would be what we now call what am I riddles. Many of these riddles don't survive to this day but many of them do. The greatest source of riddles from this day is the Exeter Book. This book contains 94 riddles from the time period, one of the greatest historic collections of riddles. Unlike the Greeks, the Anglo-Saxons viewed riddles as entertainment rather than useful to philosophy. From the Anglo-Saxon era until the modern time period riddles have primarily remained what am I riddles. A property of language is that words gain and lose meaning over time, riddles has not been exempt to this process. Riddles have been seen as great questions or mysteries for so long that they carry connotations of large mysteries, a connotation that is very appealing to article writers. For this reason the largest conundrums in the world have been called riddles. Puns actually stretch the meaning of the term less since they actually do have several meanings. Even though they have not traditionally been viewed as riddles. No matter what you call a riddle or what a riddle is they are fun and interesting bits of logic. But with all of this confusion there is one thing we can be sure of: the meaning of riddles is a riddle. For riddles from all of the time periods discussed here visit Good Riddles Now's main riddles page.
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