In the saga of Ragnar Lodbrog, the King bids Aslaug come to him clothed yet naked, accompanied yet alone, fed yet empty. She complies by casting off her garments but covering herself with her golden hair that flows to her feet, taking with her a dog only, and chewing a blade of garlic. Satisfied with her wit, Ragnar marries her. She became by him the mother of five sons, one of whom was the ancestor of Harald Fairhair, who made Norway into one realm under his sceptre. Aslaug was the daughter of Sigurd and Brunhild, made familiar to us through Wagner’s “Ring of the Nibelungen.”
The forfeits of a child’s game of the present day, to stand in the corner on one leg, to call up the chimney, to kiss everyone in the room—are the faintest ghostly reminiscences of the terrible forfeit, which, in the mythic age of mankind, had to be paid by the man or woman who became liable through lack of shrewdness in the great contest of wit. The man who did not solve the riddle lost his life. The woman who failed to answer the questions had to leave her race, suffer social death, and pass over to the realm of the conquered race.
I repeat it, it is quite impossible to explain the stories of riddle-setting which appear as a matter of most serious import as they come to us out of a remote antiquity, and from every part of Europe and Asia, unless we hold that there were in a pre-historic age these contests of wit for the highest stakes, just as there were holm-gangs, duels, like those of David and Goliath, of the Horatii and Curiatii, of Herakles and Geryon.
But the existence of the riddle and of the forfeit attaching to inability to answer the riddle, does not, we may be sure, begin with such cases as the contest of Odin and Vafthrudnir, Thorr and Alvis, Œdipus and Sphinx. As it appears thus in myth, it is a survival of a still earlier condition of affairs.
At the present day throughout Europe, nurses ask children riddles, and very often a forfeit attaches to inability to answer them. This points to the riddle as a means of education of the young mind, but also as a test of its powers. In legend and myth it does not appear as educative, but as a test of mental power. How came it to be a test?
We know that among certain races in a primitive, even in a cultivated condition, the feeble and halt children are cast forth to perish. It was so with the Greeks and Romans, it was so with the Norse, it has been so in every ancient race. I cannot but suspect, from the many indications given by tradition, that the riddle was employed at one time as a brain test. That not only were the physically weak cast out, but also the mentally incapable.
The most startling reminiscence of the old ordeal of brains is that of the Wartburg Contest in 1206 or 1207, under the Landgrave Hermann. The poem of the “Kriec von Wartburg” was not indeed composed till a century later, but that only makes it the more astonishing. It represents the minnesingers under the Landgrave contesting in song and riddle, and those who are defeated forfeit life. Christian knights and ladies could look on at a tourney in the lists with life at stake, and Christian knights and ladies in the fourteenth century thought it by no means a monstrous thing that he who could not answer a riddle should submit his neck to the executioner’s sword. Such a condition of ideas is only conceivable as a heritage from a past when men had to show that they had an intellectual as well as a physical qualification to live among their fellow-men.
The riddle has gone into an infinity of forms. A German writer[39] sets to work to analyse its various manifestations. There is the numerical riddle, the conundrum, the logogryph, the charade, the rebus, the picture puzzle, the epigram, and so forth. Its last transformation is the novel of the type of Wilkie Collins’ “Moonstone,” in which the brain of the reader is kept in tension throughout, and the imagination at work to discover the solution of the question—Who stole the moonstone? A German poet, who cannot have thought much on the matter, says:—
“The riddle, charade, and all of that ilk,
Are the bacon and beans of small brains.”