Page:Primitive Culture Vol 1.djvu/111
And every time she went over a gap, She left a bit of her tail in a trap?'
So thoroughly does riddle-making belong to the mythologic stage of thought, that any poet's simile, if not too far-fetched, needs only inversion to be made at once into an enigma. The Hindu calls the Sun Saptâsva, i.e. 'seven-horsed,' while, with the same thought, the old German riddle asks, 'What is the chariot drawn by the seven white and seven black horses?' (the year, drawn by the seven days and nights of the week.[1]) Such, too, is the Greek riddle of the two sisters, Day and Night, who gave birth each to the other to be born of her again:
Εἰσὶ κασίγνηται διτταί, ὧν ἡ μία τίκτει
Τὴν ἑτέραν, αὐτὴ δὲ τεκοῦσ' ὑπὸ τῆσδε τεκνοῦται;
and the enigma of Kleoboulos, with its other like fragments of rudimentary mythology:
Εἰς ὁ πατήρ, παῖδες δὲ δυώδεκα· τῶν δέ γ' ἑκάστῳ
Παῖδες ἔασι τριήκοντ' ἄνδιχα εἶδος ἔχουσαι·
Ηι μὲν λευκαὶ ἔασιν ἰδεῖν, ᾗ δ' αὖτε μέλαιναι·
Ἀθάνατοι δέ τ' ἐοῦσαι ἀποφθίνουσιν ἅπασαι.
'One is the father, and twelve the children, and, born unto each one,
Maidens thirty, whose form in twain is parted asunder,
White to behold on the one side, black to behold on the other,
All immortal in being, yet doomed to dwindle and perish.'[2]
Such questions as these may be fairly guessed now as in old times, and must be distinguished from that scarcer class which require the divination of some unlikely event to solve them. Of such the typical example is Samson's riddle, and there is an old Scandinavian one like it. The story is that Gestr found a duck sitting on her nest in an ox's horned skull, and thereupon propounded a riddle, describing with characteristic Northman's metaphor the ox with its horns fancied as already made into drinking-horns. The following translation does not exaggerate the quaintness of