Free The Riddles of The Hobbit by Adam Roberts Page A

of the things riddles do is close the ground between mundane puzzle and divine mystery. There are several ways in which this is made manifest in Dark Age culture. Here is an example of what I mean: one way this culture tried to understand the puzzling nature of divine–mortal interaction was by having a god actually pose riddles to a mortal, in a contest. Indeed, riddle contests were an important part of Dark Age culture. This might be by way of passing the time and having fun; but they also had a deeper significance.
    One example of this latter is the field of law. However counter-intuitive it might seem to modern sensibilities, Dark Age culture closely connected legal process and riddles. Perhaps this had to do with a sense that the law was rarely simple or straightforward; for the law, after all, tends to highlight puzzling or counter-intuitive aspects of human existence. In Dark Age and early medieval Ireland and Wales the riddle was thought an essential means of both teaching and practising law. 19 Where the latter is concerned, Judges in early Irish law courts were expected to base their judgment on five grounds, bringing to bear natural justice, Scripture, legal analogy as well as two riddle-like elements: the
fásach
(a group of legal maxims that can be thought of part of wisdom literature more generally) and the
roscad
. This last is a mode of gnomic verse jurists were taught, and which Fergus Kelly argues can best be thought of as riddles. 20 Riddles are a mode of wisdom, and wisdom should inform legal judgment. To quote Christopher Guy Yocum:
    While judges were not valued as highly as poets, possibly because of the view that they were artisans, the cultivation of wisdom literature was apparently entrusted to judges as part of their duties in regard to the law. 21
    We have evidence that the riddle was used as an instructional tool in Welsh and Irish law schools; and can assume it was used elsewhere in the northern world. The
Gúbretha Caratniad
(‘False Judgments of Caratnia’) is an Early Irish legal dialogue that foregrounds howimportant riddles were to Early Irish and Welsh jurisprudence. It is found in a manuscript dating from the mid twelfth century—Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson MS B 502—though the work itself is considerably older. It details a question and answer to-and-fro between a Judge called Caratnia and his king Conn Cétchathach. The Judge makes a series of ‘false’ legal judgments, and the king points out that these judgments contravene Irish law. The judge then explains the particular circumstances that make these superficially ‘false’ judgments actually true. As Robin Chapman Stacey points out, ‘the genre to which these conversations belong’ is the riddle. He adds that the fact that riddles formed part of a legal education ‘is not surprising’.
    As Joan Radner has demonstrated, the genre [of riddles] itself is used frequently, in Irish and other world traditions, to underscore the limitations of human knowledge and categorizing techniques. ‘Riddling,’ she writes, ‘reminds people of the unknown, of the limitations of what they regard as sensible and logical, of the inadequacy of their understanding. They are “manipulations of the power of knowledge,” that implicitly render ambiguous or paradoxical that which might otherwise seem to be predictable and secure.’ 22
    One reason riddles were treated with such judicial respect by the Northmen is that the gods love them. To meet a stranger, particularly a hooded-stranger with one eye and a mysterious manner, might well mean that you have met Odin himself, the father of the gods. And if Odin asked you a riddle, you had better know the answer. Indeed, riddle-contests like this—in which a supernatural creature asks a riddle to be solved by a mortal on pain of death—appear all over world-culture. We can hardly avoid thinking of the Sphinx testing Oedipus (‘what walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon and