Riddle - Riddles As A Game

Riddles As A Game

The Riddle Game is a formalized guessing game, a contest of wit and skill in which players take turns asking riddles. The player that cannot answer loses. Riddle games occur frequently in mythology and folklore as well as in popular literature. One prominent literary account of a riddle-game, drawing on a wider literary tradition of mythological wisdom-contests, occurs in the Old Norse Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks, where the god Odin challenges King Heidrek to answer his riddles. This was influential on later literature: disguised, the god plays one such game in Richard Wagner's Siegfried. In J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit Gollum challenges Bilbo Baggins to a riddle competition for his life. Bilbo breaks "the ancient rules" of the game but is able to escape with Gollum's magic ring. As happens in the Norse tale, although Bilbo asked more of a simple question than a riddle, by attempting to answer it rather than challenging it Gollum accepted it as a riddle; by accepting it, his loss was binding.

In The Grey King, the third book of Susan Cooper's fantasy sequence The Dark is Rising, Will and Bran must win a riddle game in order for Bran to claim his heritage as the Pendragon.

In Stephen King's The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands and The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass, the ka-tet must riddle against Blaine the Mono in order to save their lives. At first Blaine can answer all riddles posed to him by the ka-tet easily, but then Eddie Dean, one of the ka-tet, gains the upper hand when he starts to ask "joke riddles", effectively frustrating Blaine's highly logical mind.

A Riddle Game plays a key role in various versions of Turandot. The suitors need to answer all three questions to gain the Princess's hand, or else they are beheaded - In Puccini's opera Turandot grimly warns Calaf 'The riddles are three, but Death is one'.