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In Austen’s 1815 novel Emma, the title character outwits a mercenary suitor when she successfully solves his riddle. Think of this one in two parts, and, for another hint, think of what the suitor is doing.
“My first displays the wealth and pomp of kings,
Lords of the earth! their luxury and ease.
Another view of man, my second brings,
Behold him there, the monarch of the seas!”
Courtship. The first part, which “displays the wealth and pomp of kings,” represents the “court” part of the word, and the second part, “the monarch of the seas,” is the “ship.” This fictional riddler sure was feeling confident, attempting to court a woman with a riddle about courtship. It doesn’t work in his favour, though, since Emma both beats his riddle and turns down his proposal.
The classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, published in 1865, is chock-full of nonsense, and this riddle is no exception. When Alice is at the Mad Tea Party, the Hatter himself asks this perplexing question. Riddle-solvers, beware: don’t expect a straight answer from anyone in Wonderland. “Why is a raven like a writing desk?”
The Mad Hatter hasn’t the slightest idea, and neither do we. This riddle is famous because of its lack of an answer: when Alice gives up and asks for the answer, the Hatter says, “I haven’t the slightest idea!” He was asking a question, not telling a riddle. Carroll even admitted that he himself hadn’t thought of an answer. However, readers pestered him so much about it that he eventually came up with one. In a preface to a later edition of Wonderland, he wrote, “because it can produce a few notes, though they are very flat; and it is never put with the wrong end in front!” The nineteenth-century puzzle expert Sam Loyd thought of another response: “because Poe wrote on both,” referencing Edgar Allan Poe’s celebrated work The Raven.
While this isn’t a literary riddle, it’s certainly gone down in history as one of the most famous ever because of its supposed creator: Albert Einstein. Though it’s never been outright proven that a young Einstein created this riddle, legend has it that he did—and that he predicted that only two percent of people would be able to crack it. In our opinion, Einstein should’ve had a little more faith in people: the puzzle is totally solvable if you can use logic to work your way through the clues! Here are those clues:
There are five houses in a row. Each house is painted a different colour and has a person of a different nationality living in it. Each person drinks a different beverage, smokes a different type of cigar, and owns a different animal as a pet. Using these 15 clues, which person owns the pet fish?
The Brit lives in the red house.
The Swede has a pet dog.
The Dane drinks tea.
The green house is directly to the left of the white house.
The person in the green house drinks coffee.
The person who smokes Pall Mall has a pet bird.
The person in the yellow house smokes Dunhill cigars.
The person in the centre house drinks milk.
The Norwegian lives in the first house.
The person who smokes Blends lives next to the person with the pet cat.
The person with the pet horse lives next to the one who smokes Dunhill.
The person who smokes BlueMaster drinks beer.
The German smokes Prince.
The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
The person who smokes Blends has a neighbour who drinks water.
The German owns the fish. To figure this one out, try making a chart showing each house and filling out the information as you deduce it.
This stumper comes from James Joyce’s twentieth-century behemoth of a novel, Ulysses. Stephen Dedalus, the character who is supposed to represent Joyce himself, is teaching a class on Roman history and poses a riddle to his students. The answer is so specific, and the fictional students so confused, that most scholars who read Ulysses come to the conclusion that Joyce was poking fun at riddles and at people who take them way too seriously. Here it is:
“The cock crew,
The sky was blue:
The bells in heaven
Were striking eleven.
‘Tis time for this poor soul
To go to heaven.”
“The fox burying his grandmother under a hollybush.” If you’re scratching your head right now, well, that’s almost definitely what Joyce wanted. As Don Gifford puts it in “Notes for Joyce,” this is a riddle that “is unanswerable unless the answer is already known.”
In this 1937 precursor to The Lord of the Rings, Bilbo Baggins, the titular Hobbit, finds himself riddle-solving for his life to escape from the underground lair of the evil Gollum. Gollum tells Bilbo he’ll grant him safe passage if he solves five separate riddles, the last of which is this:
“This thing all things devours;
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats mountain down.”
Time. Bilbo solves every other riddle correctly, but with this one, he’s just lucky. Asking for Gollum to give him more time to solve it, he blurts out the word “time”… which is the correct answer!
