RIDDLES, PUZZLES, GUESSING GAMES

Riddles and guessing games belong to every culture and language. They generate universal fascination. They often take the form of questions and answers that occur unexpectedly during meetings with mysterious strangers. In our own English-language tradition, consider for example, the subtle mystery and power of ballads like 'Scarborough fair', the encounter in 'As you came from the Holy land / Of Walsinghame', which is attributed to Sir Walter Raleigh, Keats' meeting with the fey in 'La Belle Dame sans Merci', and Yeats' lyric, 'Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop'. These kinds of dialogues can develop into entire narratives, as in Coleridge's 'Ancient Mariner', and the entire tradition of conversations with ghosts and spirits in the underworld, as in the Odyssey, the Aeneid and the Divine Comedy, not to mention Wilfred Owen's 'Strange Meeting'. With such themes as these in the back of his mind, over years of running poetry writing workshops, he'd invented several riddle-games. Here, Berengarten presents one example for all ages from secondary school students to paisioners.