RIDDLES AND MY REFLECTION ( LIT.OO1---BEED-1B)

                 RIDDLES  AND  MY REFLECTION

                                     ( LIT.OO1---BEED-1B)

Riddle-poems are a lot of fun. They're an amusing game for children and adults, a connection to history, and a way to approach poetry that avoids the conceit and self-indulgence that lays waste to so much of it.

Anyone can appreciate riddle-poems, and almost anyone can learn to make them. By doing so, you can enjoy yourself, sharpen your wits, learn a new way to look at the world, and perhaps tap resources of creativity you never suspected yourself to have.

With the riddle-poem comes the riddle-game. To play the riddle-game, two or more people take turns making up riddles on the spot. You win points, or jellybeans, or whatever, by answering riddles correctly (we'll present some rules for a modern version of the riddle-game later). If you're feeling uninspired, you can use a riddle you've heard somewhere else, but doing that a lot is considered poor form. The riddle-game should be about creativity, not rote memory.

At this point, a lot of you are probably thinking Improvise poetry? I couldn't possibly! This isn't for me! But you can do it. One of the charms of the riddle-game is that it proves that poetry need not be an elite art. I'll show you how to make beautiful riddle-poems with simple methods that are play to use, not hard specialized work.

We know of many cultures that have riddle-poem traditions. The best-documented, and the one we'll be taking our model from, is the riddle-poem tradition of the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings, and the Teutons. These peoples of the Dark Ages played the riddle-game around their hearth-fires for more than five hundred years. Some of their riddles have come down to us.

Here is a modern English translation of a simple riddle poem, over a thousand years old. It's from a very old manuscript called the Book of Exeter, which contains a treasury of Anglo-Saxon riddles. It's one of my favorites.

  Riddle: A wonder on the wave / water became bone.

  Answer: Ice on a lake or seashore.

This simple one-line poem is an excellent example of the riddle-poem style. Good riddle-poems are terse, pithy, visual, rhythmic. Like haiku, they take their power from a compelling image.

To appreciate this poem fully, speak it to yourself out loud (the slash represents a caesura or pause). In the Dark Ages, poetry was a spoken art. Poems were written to be chanted or sung. Anglo-Saxon (the parent language of English) was a rolling, sonorous, thunderous language well-suited to poetry and oration. Some of this quality comes through even in translation.