My first is a boot, my second is a jack.
Conceivably Mr. Max Müller may mean that in riddles an almost obsolete word was used to designate the object. Perhaps, instead of ‘the Dark One,’ a peasant would say, ‘What is the Rooky One?’ But as soon as nobody knew what ‘the Rooky One’ meant, the riddle would cease to exist—Rooky One and all. You cannot imagine several generations asking each other—
What is the Rooky One that swallows?
if nobody knew the answer. A man who kept boring people with a mere ‘sell’ would be scouted; and with the death of the answerless riddle the difficult word ‘Rooky’ would die. But Mr. Max Müller says, ‘Riddles would cease to be riddles if the names had been clear and intelligible.’ The reverse is the fact. In the riddles he gives there are seldom any ‘names;’ but the epithets and descriptions are as clear as words can be:—
Who are the mother and children in a house, all having bald heads?—The moon and stars.
Language cannot be clearer. Yet the riddle has not ‘ceased to be a riddle,’ as Mr. Max Müller thinks it must do, though the words are ‘clear and intelligible.’ On the other hand, if the language is not clear and intelligible, the riddle would cease to exist. It would not amuse if nobody understood it. You might as well try to make yourself socially acceptable by putting conundrums in Etruscan as by asking riddles in words not clear and intelligible in themselves, though obscure in their reference. The difficulty of a riddle consists, not in the obscurity of words or names, but in the description of familiar things by terms, clear as terms, denoting their appearance and action. The mist is described as ‘dark,’ ‘swallowing,’ ‘one that fears the wind,’ and so forth. The words are pellucid.
Thus ‘ordinary appellatives’ (i. 99) are not ‘avoided’ in riddles, though names (sun, mist) cannot be used in the question because they give the answer to the riddle.
For all these reasons ancient riddles cannot explain the obscurity of mythological names. As soon as the name was too obscure, the riddle and the name would be forgotten, would die together. So we know as little as ever of the purely hypothetical process by which a riddle, or popular poetical saying, remains intelligible in a language, while the mot d’énigme, becoming unintelligible, turns into a proper name—say, Cronos. Yet the belief in this process as a vera causa is essential to our author’s method.
Here Mr. Max Müller warns us that his riddle theory is not meant to explain ‘the obscurities of all mythological names. This is a stratagem that should be stopped from the very first.’ It were more graceful to have said ‘a misapprehension.’
Another ‘stratagem’ I myself must guard against. I do not say that no unintelligible strings of obsolete words may continue to live in the popular mouth. Old hymns, ritual speeches, and charms may and do survive, though unintelligible. They are reckoned all the more potent, because all the more mysterious. But an unintelligible riddle or poetical saying does not survive, so we cannot thus account for mythology as a disease of language.