The Semitic people held in high regard the power to read riddles, and this power, as in the story of Solomon, blends with the higher intelligence which makes for wisdom.
Perhaps the most famous of Hebrew conundrums is that of Samson, the strong of intellect as of body, who, when he found the honey which the wild bees had placed in the carcass of a lion, read to the Philistines this riddle: "Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness."
Among the Greeks and Romans, as among earlier peoples, all forms of wit and play of word and fancy were tried and popular. D'Israeli, in his "Curiosities of Literature," records that "It is certain that Cicero was an inveterate punster; and he seems to have been more ready with them than with repartees."
The story of the famous riddle of the Sphinx comes down from Greek mythology. The city of Thebes was infested by a monster having the body of a lion and the upper part of a woman. She lay crouching upon a rock near a narrow pass which led to the city, and propounded to all travelers a riddle, allowing all who guessed to pass safely, but killing all who failed. The uniform failure of all who came, and their subsequent slaughter, made great lamentation in the city. Œdipus, the unacknowledged son of the King of Thebes, who had shortly before unknowingly killed his father, undertook to rid the city of the monster. He boldly confronted the Sphinx, who asked him the riddle, "What animal is it that in the morning goes on four feet, at noon on two, and in the evening upon three?" Œdipus replied, "Man, who in childhood creeps on hands and knees, in manhood walks erect, and in old age goes with the aid of a staff."[1] The Sphinx thereupon cast herself from the rock and perished, and the Thebans made Œdipus king.
[1] See Gayley's "Classic Myths in English Literature and in Art" (Boston, Ginn and Company, 1911).
There is one age-old riddle, still current in Brittany, Germany, and Gascony, about which the tradition hovers that Homer died with vexation at not being able to discover the answer. It is, "What we caught we threw away, what we could not catch we kept."
Early folklore riddles dealt with natural phenomena. With the Wolofs the riddle of the wind asks, "What flies forever and rests never?" The Teutonic form was, "What can go in the face of the sun, yet leave no shadow?" The Basutos of South Africa ask: "What is wingless and legless, yet flies fast and cannot be imprisoned?" and answer, "The voice."
The oldest English riddles extant are among the fragments found in "The Exeter Book." These date back to the eighth century and were written in Northumbria. While these are not conundrums in the modern sense, they are very elaborate studies of analogy, and contain some of the most imaginative of Anglo-Saxon poetry.
In the early half of the [seventeenth] century there were published several small books, which contain the sources of many of the conundrums of the present day. These books have been brought together by W. Carew Hazlitt, under the title "Shakespeare's Jest-Books" (London, 1864). The dates of these books are variously 1600, 1630, 1636, and 1639. The form is narrative, with occasional dialogue, and approaches that of the conundrum, and the wit though far from subtle is often effective. Though the names of the authors of some of these books are known, the authorship of others is in doubt. They were to a considerable extent not attributable to one man, but were the bright sayings of the day.
The first chapter of the present volume, entitled "Early English Wit," brings together, in modernized form, some of the brightest of these sayings. The strangest thing about such a collection is to discover of what antiquity some current conundrums are. That is notably true of one taken from "Demaundes Joyous," printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1511, namely: