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Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Three answers to Riddle 69
Riddle 69: sounds like a piece of high-class erotica, I know, but actually it is an Anglo-Saxon riddle from the Exeter Book. It’s true to say that some editions of the Exeter Book (this one, for instance, edited by Craig Williamson) don’t include it as a riddle in its own right, arguing instead that it is the final line of the previous riddle which has somehow become separated from its place; but, as the unfortunately named Krapp and Dobbie, in their The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Record, point out, it is written as a separate riddle in the Exeter MS. They argue that ‘there is nothing in the texts of the two riddles which would justify associating them.’ So let’s take it as a single, one-line riddle. Here it is, followed by Kevin Crossley-Holland’s concise translation
Wundor wearð on wege: wæter wearð to bane.
On the way, a miracle: water becomes bone.
Scholars agree that answer to this riddle is: ice. Scholars don’t always agree on the answer to any given riddle. For example, various OE riddle experts have looked at Riddle 74 (‘I was once a young woman,/a glorious warrior, a grey-haired queen./I soared with birds, stepped on the earth,/swam in the sea—dived under the waves, languid amongst fishes. I had a living spirit’) and variously suggested cuttlefish, water, siren and swan as the answer. By comparison, and remembering that the answers to these riddles are nowhere written down or ‘officially’ tabulated, ‘on the way, a miracle: water becomes bone ... ice’ looks relatively straightforward. It’s a nicely satisfying and poetic image, too.
But here’s another answer to the riddle:
Climbing Cooper’s Hill, and looking back at the curve of the Thames in the bright, cloudy light: the afternoon sun polishing away all grey or blue from the water until it is white, its edges sharpened by the angle of illumination, looking like nothing so much as a mighty rib-bone gleaming, set in the flesh of the land ... and I thought to myself yes, water becomes bone.
The answer ice identifies two points of similarity (hardness, colour) with bone; but this vision of the Thames identifies three (colour, shape, setting). Does that make it a ‘better’ answer to the Exeter Book riddle?
Here’s a third possible answer to the riddle:
The company said the decision to produce a calcium water had been made after the US Health Department highlighted calcium deficiency as a major problem in the US. SWG claims to be the first US bottled water company to directly address the growing consumer awareness of the benefits of calcium for healthier bones and teeth.
Or actually I prefer:
Milk, rich in calcium, builds strong bones!
Now I’d hazard that I wouldn’t find an Old English scholar from here to Kalamazoo who’d so much as give the above ‘answer’ the time of day, much less a mention in a critical edition of the Exeter Book. This goes back to the questions of ‘intention’ that various people have been kicking around on this selfsame Valve over the last couple of weeks. The, as far as I can see, unwritten rules of scholarly investigation into OE riddles goes something like this: the point of the exercise is not ingeniously or otherwise to answer these riddles; the point is one of imaginative entry into the mind of an Anglo Saxon, to answer them in a way that is consistent with the worldview of an Anglo-Saxon mind. The first answer (ice) is the sort of answer a ninth-century Middlesaexan might think of. The second (the Thames seen from a hill under certain conditions of light) is an answer that, although it probably wouldn’t occur to Mr ninth-century, would at least be comprehensible to him. But the third answer (‘milk’) would make no sense to him. The fact that it makes perfect sense to a 21st-century dweller in Middlesex is not relevant. These, after all, are Anglo-Saxon, not modern English, riddles.
But why do we conceive of riddles in this way? OE scholars link ‘riddle’ (from rædan, to counsel, advise or teach) to the common feature of OE poetry known as ‘kennings’ (calling the sea ‘the whale road’ and so on). Kennings, like riddles, are modes of knowing; they’re about giving the commonplace a conceptual shake to enable us to see it anew. Thinking of milk as a way in which water becomes bone is a perfectly good way of knowing. If Bilbo Baggins asks ‘what have I got in my pocket?’ and Gollum answers ‘molecules of air’, then Gollum has answered the question asked; it would be illegitimate for Bilbo to say ‘no … although I do have molecules of air on my pocket, that’s not what was in my mind when I posed the question’. Or, more to the point, if Bilbo were to say that, then he ought to have asked a different question, along the lines of ‘I’m thinking of something: guess what it is’. But that sort of question would make a very poor riddle indeed. Or:
SPHINX: You must answer my question or die! What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon and three legs in the evening?
OEDIPUS: Samuel Johnson’s well-trained dog.
SPHINX: No! The answer is man, who crawls as a babe, walks tall in youth, and uses a stick in his dotage!
OEDIPUS: You said morning, noon and evening; not infancy, youth and dotage.
SPHINX: It’s metaphorical!
OEDIPUS: Besides, a baby doesn’t walk on four legs. It crawls on its legs and arms. Arms aren’t legs.
SPHINX: [Utters a howling, glass-shattering shriek] Metaphorical legs! Not literal legs! Legs in a man-ner of speak-ing!.
OEDIPUS: Well, it’s half metaphor and half literal, isn’t it; since the baby uses two legs and two arms. So of the four legs stipulated, two are literally legs and two are only metaphorically legs.
SPHINX: Git!
OEDIPUS: So, which is it to be, literal or metaphorical?
SPHINX: I’m not listening! I’m putting my wings over my ears! La! La! La!
OEDIPUS: And the noontime walking on two legs is literal, not metaphorical. So your riddle mixes metaphor and literal application in an inconsistent manner.
SPHINX: Shut up! Shut up!
OEDIPUS: Of these two answers to the riddle, mine better fits the terms of the question.
SPHINX: That’s not the point. When I asked the question I was not inviting you to answer it; I was demanding that you guess what was in my mind! I was thinking of man, not Samuel Johnson’s dog; you didn’t guess that. So you must die!
OEDIPUS: That’s hardly fair. Call your supervisor; I want to have a word with her.
[There’s a great deal of squawking and shrieking. The Over-Sphinx comes in.]
OVER-SPHINX: Can I help you?
OEDIPUS: Yes. I’m far from happy with the level of service I’m getting from this Sphinx. In the first place she asked a thoroughly misleading question, and now she’s trying to palm me off with an illogical and internally inconsistent answer, even though I provided, as I was requestred to do, a perfectly reasonable answer.
OVER-SPHINX: I do apologise sir. Might I offer you a replacement riddle? I can offer you ‘Is the present king of France bald?’ or ‘how many roads must a man walk down?’
OEDIPUS: No I think I’d like my money back.
Surely it is legitimate to argue that the purpose of asking a question is not to try and guess what is in the mind of the questioner, but to answer the question; which is to say, the point of interpreting text is not to try and retrieve what was in the mind of the author but, you know, to read the text. So I’m going to stick with milk.
Comments
Heh.
Ah, well, Bilbo knew that he didn’t ask a proper riddle, and that Gollum would be quite within his rights to challenge it, but once Gollum answered, the creature was bound by the ancient rules to stick to the terms of their agreement.
In the same vein, it is also legitimate to believe that an answer to a riddle must consider the times/culture of the riddler. Why resort to intentionality, at all? I agree the answer should be the best fit to a riddle, but I have no problem with saying that that “fit” is culturally and language specific. I see no real need to resort to intentionality (since that, of course, would be determined by cultural context, anyway). I think it is quite fair to insist there could be better answers than the one in the mind of the riddler, and quite fair to insist that the strength of answers should be determined by their aptness, as long as anachronisms are avoided.
At any rate, rules of this nature imply consent, so if you want to change the implicit rules of riddling, I’d think you must win consent beforehand. At the very least, you must—as you did—announce that you’re disregarding old understandings. And, yeah, that’d mean no publication in OE journals ;)
Is the last dialogue from something, or did you whip it up yourself? Because I have a reading of Baudelaire’s Spleen II that partially hinges on the fact that “sphinx,” as a sort of catachresis, is a pretty decent answer to the riddle of the sphinx and that answering “man” already requires us to think of man as a sort of monster (specifically because of the cane counting for a leg, inorganic matter getting incorporated into the organic body, which turns out to be not dissimilar to the Baudelare’s and Hegel’s accounts of writing...). I actually start my poetry course out with similar questions to the ones you’re asking here, and it goes a long way to explaining De Man’s description of genre as a “defensive motion of understanding” (in “Anthropomorphism & Trope in the Lyric"). The question about answers aside, what authorizes us to read these riddles as riddles in the first place? Why is “I am a lonely creature scarred by swords” a riddle which antropomorphizes a shield rather than an invincible humanoid creature’s lament?
Adam, this is a great post. Thanks very much for composing and sharing it.
As a woefully insufficient return on your investment here, and in the spirit of the post itself, I offer an alternative answer to your question about answers and questions — “alternative”, in the sense not of competing, but rather of adding or supplementing:
The answer to the question, like every genuine answer, is only the final result of the last step in a long series of questions. Each answer remains in force as an answer only as long as it is rooted in questioning
Did Heidegger ("The Origin of the Work of Art") ever write a finer, more insightful line than that one?
rob - given the context, is that last question rhetorical?
Adam, thank you! Your post introduced me to a completely new work of literature, and raises broad, ticklish questions. After all, don’t most feats of literary criticism happen through a process of “unriddling”? I’m particularly taken with the idea that this unriddling happens through common metaphorical perceptions, as a prerequisite for guessing the other person’s metaphors—that’s what the quote about Cooper’s Hill implies most strongly.
Also, perhaps I’m not the only one who feels both fascination and nausea at the line “dived under waves, languid amongst fishes.” It is something rich and strange.
Just to prove you wrong.... I’m an Old English scholar between ‘here’ and Kalamazoo, and I’m willing to give your solution to Riddle 69 some time today. The book I’m writing about the Old English Riddles is pivoting precisely around the issue of *answers* (as opposed to *the* answer) to the Anglo-Saxon Riddles. You’re absolutely right, however: the unwritten rule in OE riddle scholarship is that a legitimate answer must be something that an Anglo-Saxon might have thought up. Personally, though, I think the spirit of the riddles is that different people in different contexts produce different solutions, and so a modern reader is obviously (if not ‘legitimately’) going to be able to come up with entirely new solutions. My ideal book (which I don’t think I will be able to produce) would contain ten equally cogent solutions to each riddles. I’m happy when I can get five, though, and I have to admit that I am submitting to that unwritten rule, but, of course, I do want to publish my book eventually....
Many thanks for these responses.
Sisyphus: “In the same vein, it is also legitimate to believe that an answer to a riddle must consider the times/culture of the riddler.”
Well, yes, somebody could (and most OE scholars do) argue that without inconsistency. But it doesn’t invalidate the other approach, surely.
surlacarte: “Is the last dialogue from something, or did you whip it up yourself?”
The latter. Your Baudelairean answer that the Sphinx is her own answer is new to me, and absolutely fascinating. I don’t think it’s even catachresis, actually; but a perfectly valid if different angle of attack, focussing on the monstrosity implicit in the original question.
rob: That’s very far from being the least intelligent thing Heidegger ever said.
Joe: OE riddles are excellent. Crossley-Holland’s penguin edition of them is very good, except that it doesn’t include the original Anglo Saxon (it could have done; it’s a slim volume). I agree with you about the “dived under waves, languid amongst fishes” line, and would add that none of the four solutions proffered by scholarship seem to me really satisfying. Siren comes closest to the terms of the riddle, I’d say, but lacks a certain je ne sais quoi.
Like everyone else, I enjoyed this post very much--but I’m not sure about it. Suppose you presented me with the water-bone riddle and I turned away for a moment to write a short poem--"Suddenly the puddle was a femur"--and then turned back to you and said: “Here’s another answer. Water becomes bone in my poem.” Am I right in thinking that you would be bound, according to the argument you’ve set out here, to accept my answer as valid? But wouldn’t that be unfair of me?
One thing I quite like about this riddle is the way the phenomenon it describes feels analogous to the experience of answering riddles. When I first said to myself, “Water becomes bone--the answer is ice,” a thought that had been for a moment fluid and elusive took on a pleasing new solidity. Of course the value of this kind of solidity should not be overstated, but I’m inclined to describe my uneasiness by saying that your argument makes riddles too watery. Is that reasonable?
John (and Adam) - this is sort of what I meant by the sphinx as a catachresis - one simply invents a monstrous, unnamed or unexplained “X” that meets the criteria of the riddle almost by fiat: what has four legs at dawn, two legs at midday, etc? A monster with four legs at dawn, two legs at midday, etc. Let’s call it an “asdf.” Or, hey, let’s call it a sphinx, since a sphinx is defined as a monster primarily by the fact that it’s mysterious, that no one actually quite knows what it is, and that it’s a mixture of different creatures with different numbers of legs. Similarly, when does water become bone? When water becomes bone. But when is that?
This is arguably what happens in a first reading of a riddle of a riddle before it’s solved - one creates an empty category and waits to fill it in with something that already has name; that is, one tries to substitute a metaphor for the catachresis.
I think in both cases, sphinx and “suddenly the puddle was a femur” are in fact answers to the riddle, but as answers they simply repeat the original predicament - the answers themselves are texts that can and must be read as riddles. But in the process of answering, the riddle has changed. Similar to the way that Baudelaire’s “Oblivion” “reads” “Correspondence” as a lyric (again, De Man, “Anthropomorphism and Trope"). There’s a certain connection to the Heidegger quote here as well.
This is all too hasty, of course. But it’s a start.
By the way, excellent point about the riddle staging the scene of answering riddles. Similar thing with the riddle of the sphinx - Sphinx (a monster) says “I have four legs at dawn”; Oedipus (a man) says “You are a man”... There’s a certain sense in which Oedipus obviously has it completely backwards…
Of course, not all riddles are about producing answers from the listener; some are about showing off a clever answer that’s already been devised. Modern riddles, for instance, are jokes, and so a very specific answer is usually required:
Q: How do you titillate an ocelot?
A: Oscillate its tits a lot.
Obviously, “Show it a picture of a sexy ocelot of the opposite sex,” is unsatisfactory, true or not. There’s only one correct answer to a riddle like this, and if the listener knows it then the joke is ruined. It seems to me that the same is true with the riddle of the sphinx: even though, in the story, the sphinx is quizzing Oedipus, the main interest of the storyteller seems to be to show off this clever way of thinking about Man. Which is why the sphinx jumps to her death--she’s mortified that he’s heard that one already.
Given the prominence of riddles in Oedipus (esp. the riddle of his birth), the narrative context is more complex than you give it credit for, tomemos. At a minimum, the self-destruction of the sphinx, a figure for riddles, secrets, the limits of knowledge, and indeed catachresis, has as much to do with man’s hubristic claim to have solved the riddle of his identity and abolished self-doubt as with the literal context of Oedipus proving more clever than the sphinx. But the irony is that at the moment when Oedipus thinks he’s solved the riddle of his identity, he’s busy fulling the prophecy, and totally blind to the riddle of his birth. Oedipus is as clueless as ever, and most of all about “man,” at the point at which he solves the riddle. So the answer is just as puzzling as the question. Would it be any surprise in this context if there were a second riddle or a second answer hiding in the scene, particularly when the sphinx is such a perfect answer to the riddle?
Granted, especially from an aesthetic point of view, not all riddles need be subject to this sort of semantic drift. Titillating an ocelot is a good example. But the existence of “oscillate its tits a lot” as an answer is not what excludes other answers. Rather, there simply are no other good answers (at least, I don’t know any...it be hard to prove the non-existence of better or more satisfying answers). One could also imagine riddles with no answers, like “how do you titillate and elephant.” (two scoops of ice cream and some soda just doesn’t cut it...)
Anyway, “show it a picture of a sexy ocelot” would fail to understand the question - it would fail to explain the presence of such an unlikely yet alliterative question, presumably asked in a particular tone of voice or, in this case, in a series of comments in a post on riddles - so its “correctness” as an answer would not guarantee its “correctness” as an interpretation. The same hardly seems true of “sphinx” as an answer to the riddle of the sphinx, which also potentially meets the aesthetic criteria of being “satisfactory.” Though satisfactory is hardly a reliable category…
Surlacarte, I appreciate your thorough and thoughtful response to my pretty flippant comment. I like your interpretation of why the Ocelot riddle has only one answer (there are indeed modern riddles that have multiple answers, like “How many Poles does it take to change a light bulb?") Also, you’re quite correct that the irony of Oedipus being both the wisest and most blinkered character in his own story runs throughout the entire Oedipus myth, including at the moment he solves the riddle.
At the same time, when does the Sphinx--or any animal--walk on three legs? This is the key to the riddle, and the reason--I would argue--that man is the only answer (and that the trained dog suggested to us in the post misses the point just like the “sexy ocelot” answer does). The essence of the riddle, and of man, isn’t just that he uses tools (the cane), it’s that he doesn’t change form just once, like a frog or a butterfly, but twice. His life is a kind of symmetry, as he is taken care of both in youth (by his parents) and in age (by his children), whereas when animals get old they are left to waste away. Three-leggedness is what makes man unique.
I taught Oedipus over the summer, and my class also came to the realization that Oedipus’s riddle is connected to Sophocles’s play; however, we saw the connection not in the theme of secrets and mysteries (which is definitely valid), but in the riddle’s explanation of the normal course of a man’s life, which Oedipus fails to follow. Where normally we’re supposed to we separate from our parents, marry someone new, and have our own children, Oedipus married his mother and had children with her. Whereas we’re supposed to take care of our parents just as they took care of us, Oedipus murders his father. (His parents started it, of course: they went backwards by attempting to murder their baby rather than caring for him.) This is the crime for which the gods curse the city (with infertility, importantly), and his punishment is to be cast out, deprived of the care that the old are supposed to receive.
But I like your reading too. After all this, I’d say that Adam’s central point holds:here we’re proposing multiple solution to the larger riddle, the riddle of what the sphinx’s riddle has to do with Oedipus’s story, and this certainly seems to me like a riddle with multiple answers.
Thanks for the response, tomemos. I like your reading as well. In both of our readings, man doesn’t turn out to be what we thought he was, either because the correct answer to the riddle makes man a monster or because Oedipus is a man for whom the riddle’s definition man does not apply. Your reading is clearly more worked out in terms of the specific narrative of Oedipus Rex. I haven’t thought through mine in this larger context too thoroughly, beyond the previous comment. Anyway, I’ll have to think about this (later - I’m back home for the weekend).
As for the sphinx, the reading would simply be that the number of feet are arbitrary and replaceable - the point being to signify a being that because of its monstrosity could have any number of legs. This would make the arbitrariness of the signifier an important part of the problem. But my reading sort of assumes that the sphinx, in its monstrosity, is characterized by the same degree of arbitrariness - it is the monster of monsters, the name for the most monstrous, the most arbitrary of monsters because of its association with the riddle. And yet the sphinx, at least in its visual representations (not sure if its body gets represented verbally anywhere in classical literature) does seem to be subject to the same conventions (specifically, symmetry) as other Greek monsters, none of which, as far as I can think, have an odd numbers of legs. This is a problem, though not necessarily fatal for my reading of Spleen II. Again, will think about this. No promises re: a follow up comment.
Or - well, how would you visually represent the unsolvable riddle as a monster? Any visual representation would have to be written under erasure. The unsolvable riddle monster would have any number of legs, or would not have any number of legs; any number of legs would be the number of legs that the inscrutable monster does not have. So the Egyptian sphinx statue has four legs like a cat, but other images of the sphinx have two like man (at mid-day). Isn’t this enough to say that the sphinx does not have two or four legs, that these aren’t stable representations? So why not three?
P.S. Sorry, Adam, for sort of hijacking your comments…
surlacarte: not at all! It’s a fascinating exchange, and wonderfully courteous. If only all blog comment-threads were like this.
One aspect that, I think, everyone has overlooked so far here is the fact that riddles are social activities. When people engage in a riddle, as teller or guesser, they are engaging in an activity controlled by social norms/rules and assumptions. So, when Bilbo Baggins asks his riddle, he and Gollum are aware of the rules of riddling that apply. Likewise, the OE riddlers. But the rules of riddling, being social, change over time and in different cultural contexts. One thing that remains constant perhaps is that the riddle’s answer is supposed to be witty—something surprising and/or clever and/or profound. In OE riddles, the point of the answer is often that one solution—often a bawdy one—immediately suggests itself, but the “correct” solution is innocent. There’s one OE riddle, for example, in which the suggestive language of the riddle makes listeners think that it’s referring to the male sexual organ (long and upright, hairy at the base, makes young girls cry), but in fact, “the answer” to the riddle is an onion.
Answers of riddles have less to do with the teller’s intentionality than with social conventions about riddles. But one of those conventions, another one that seems pretty constant over time, is that the teller determines the correct answer to the riddle. The guesser must come up with an answer that is witty enough to startle the teller into admitting that the guesser’s response is the best response possible. If the teller rules that the guesser’s answer is wrong, the teller must provide the guesser with the right answer—one that is more witty than the guesser’s (and that the guesser will have to admit is wittier). Those are the social rules and norms of riddling.
Let me give an example in the form of a dialogue:
SMART ALEC: What’s black and white and red/read all over?
JOHN: A newspaper.
SMART ALEC: No, a zebra with a sunburn. What’s black and white and red/read all over?
JOHN: A zebra with a sunburn?
SMART ALEC: No, a newspaper.
The teller determines the correct answer, but the teller is limited by the need to be witty and entertain the guesser. If the teller’s “correct” response does not satisfy the guesser, the riddle fails (and I know this, because I have a 12-year-old son who tells many, many failed riddles). The guesser can only win by coming up with the teller’s answer or by coming up with a *better* answer that the teller cannot top.
Another aspect that this discussion has perhaps missed is that OE riddles aren’t just riddles; they’re also artifacts of OE culture. So, if someone reads them purely as riddles and comes up with an answer that couldn’t possibly have been thought up by the original OE riddlers, that person is viewing the riddle differently from OE scholars, who are more interested in the riddles as artifacts that help us understand a past culture. I’m not sure that it’s fair to brand OE scholars as close-minded or rigid for doing this, just because they’re looking at OE artifacts as OE artifacts rather than as riddles. Since OE riddles aren’t generally circulating any longer as riddles, they’re artifacts rather than riddles now. Since no one tells them anymore, in essence, there’s no teller to determine the right answer. But understanding the probable answer that an Anglo-Saxon would have given or expected helps us to understand and appreciate OE culture better.
So, if you want to resurrect an OE riddle and tell it as a riddle again, you may determine what is or is not a correct answer to the riddle. But it won’t be an OE riddle anymore; it’ll be *your* riddle. Personally, I’d rather learn more about OE culture than hear your riddle. To be frank, milk doesn’t seem all that witty to me as an answer.
But of course OE riddles are still circulating as riddles today, judging by the fact that contemporary OE scholars are still trying to solve some of them, and the rest of us are still bemused by the possibility of additional answers. The language itself is still experienced as a call to a certain restoration of coherence, even outside of the original context, to which the call is therefore not reducible. Certain answers still feel like answers, and certain answers still feel better or wittier than others even to those of us who have no knowledge of the OE cultural criteria for choosing one answer over another. What accounts for these feelings if not for a certain formal principle inherent to language rather than a set of contextual norms?
The assumption that the riddle can be solved by determining the tradition or the person to whom it belongs is problematic. Admittedly, whatever its force as pure language, riddles are also OE cultural artifacts, and I would not malign an OE scholar for treating them as such for the purposes of learning about OE culture. But the argument that the riddles are reducible to this context comes down, in your comment, to a matter of personal preference - “I’d rather learn more about OE culture than hear your riddle.” Its also interesting that you should move from “it won’t be an OE riddle anymore” to “it’ll be *your* riddle,” foreclosing the more radical possibility that, once removed from its original context, the riddle is no one’s, that it no longer depends on its origin for the coherence of an answer; or the even more radical possibility that it might not have a coherent origin, that an OE riddler might have riddled himself a riddle that he couldn’t solve or didn’t have the best answer to, and that the contextual norms of which you speak might simply have come to cover over this split origin by conventionalizing one answer rather than another.
You wrote that, “once removed from its original context, the riddle is no one’s… it no longer depends on its origin for the coherence of an answer.” But that’s just not how language (or a riddle) works.
Language doesn’t mean much of anything once removed from its context. Take a farily simple, straightforward sentence, such as “Is there salt on the table?” What does that sentence *mean*? It *could* mean lots of things.
Imagine a polite dinner guest who looks all around the dinner table and then says, “Is there salt on the table?” That dinner guest really means, “I would like some salt, but I don’t see any on the table.”
Imagine a mother who calls from the kitchen to one of her children setting the table in the dining room, “Is there salt on the table?” The sentence now means, “Is the salt out there on the table or do I have to bring it from in here?”
Imagine a mother who walks into the dining room to discover her two children looking like cats that ate the canary and on the table an overturned salt shaker and spilled salt. She says, “Is there salt on the table?” Now it means, “What happened in here, you two?”
Imagine a chemist who is running a complicated experiment in the lab and, in a state of near panic, says to his lab assistant, “Is there salt on the table?” Now it means, “I need a compound to neutralize the volatile reaction that I’ve accidentally started. Find me something now, or she’s going to blow.”
Riddles aren’t very different from simple, straightforward sentences. They mean different things in different contexts and aren’t really the same riddle if they are removed from their original context (just as “Is there salt on the table?” isn’t always the same sentence, depending on its context).
You say, “The [riddle’s] language itself is still experienced as a call to a certain restoration of coherence, even outside of the original context, to which the call is therefore not reducible. Certain answers still feel like answers, and certain answers still feel better or wittier than others even to those of us who have no knowledge of the OE cultural criteria for choosing one answer over another. What accounts for these feelings if not for a certain formal principle inherent to language rather than a set of contextual norms?”
First, I would ask, “Is what you say here really true?” If I went out and asked 100 random people on the street this particular OE riddle ("Wundor wearð on wege: wæter wearð to bane"), would those 100 people really feel “a call to a certain restoration of coherence”? Would they even recognize the foreign words as a riddle? Would they think that I was speaking Norwegian? Would they call the police? Even if I translated the riddle into modern English (already a transformation and falsification of the language), would they see in it a riddle and know what was expected of them in terms of restoring coherence? I honestly doubt it.
Second, you’re right that some answers feel like answers, and certain answers still feel better or wittier than others, but that’s the result of one of two phenomena (or both): Either 1.) the tradition of riddling has been passed down from our OE ancestors to us over the centuries in such a way that we still recognize the genre and know roughly what to expect in terms of answers, or 2.) we have completely coopted the riddle and made it *our* riddle—made it obey *our* rules of riddling and *our* expectations for answers. I suspect that what you’re describing is a little bit of both (in that you can recognize OE answers to the riddle as legitimate answers but not necessarily as the *only* legitimate answers).
Finally, you write, “of course OE riddles are still circulating as riddles today, judging by the fact that contemporary OE scholars are still trying to solve some of them.” But OE scholars aren’t trying to solve riddles; they’re attempting to establish the significance of certain linguistic and literary artifacts for the light they shed on OE culture. So, in fact, scholarly interest in the riddles is evidence *against* their still having allure as riddles. If they were still primarily riddles to OE scholars, the scholars wouldn’t view them solely as artifacts any more than you do, and they would willingly embrace your milk answer as just as legitimate as any OE answer.
1) re: “that’s just not how language (or a riddle) works” and the salt example:
A) Your example proves that the question about salt “means different things in different contexts.” How do you get from this conclusion to the broader claim that “Language doesn’t mean much of anything once removed from its context”? In fact, in every single context you list, “salt” means something like “a crystalline compound, occurring as a mineral, a constituent of seawater, etc., and used for seasoning food, as a preservative, etc.” and table means something like “an article of furniture consisting of a flat, slablike top supported on one or more legs or other supports.”
Wouldn’t it be more accurate, therefore, to say that context, rather than a constitutive element of meaning, functions as a limiting factor? The examples you’ve chosen suggest that a set of rule-governed decoding operations are possible on any utterance independent of context; such operations would, furthermore, suffice to generate a set of possible answers for a riddle belonging to “no one” or no context. The reason context seems to be necessary is that such rule-governed transformations are unstable - they generate ambiguities, some of which can be eliminated in certain types of utterances by referring to context. Given that context-independent riddles are conceivable, then, on the basis of these rule-governed transformations, the question becomes whether riddles are the kind of discourse for which context provides a necessary limit on meaning. Which returns us to the original question, which is a question specific to riddles and not generalizable to how “language works” as a whole.
B) Elaborating on the last point - you’ve chosen your example well: the question about salt operates in a referential mode and refers exclusively to objects or substances that may be physically present in the context of utterance. Even if I grant, however, that in the examples you’ve chosen, meaning is reducible to context (which, at least for now, I will grant) it hardly follows that all language operates identically to this particular example. Does the same conclusion follow in the case of philosophical language which makes claims towards abstract generalities broader than any particular determinable referent? Does the conclusion follow in the case of literature addressed to posterity, i.e. to a context of reception that has not yet even been imagined by the writer? Does it follow in highly rhetorical language, in which multiple meanings remain in play, even deliberately? Does it follow in cases of language produced without an explicit expressive intention (cases of poetic inspiration, for example, or automatic writing)? Legal documents, contracts, petitions, etc. that can be signed or enforced in contexts vastly differed from those in which they were authored? Mathematical writing and other highly ruled-governed non-referential symbolic systems? Thus everything in your comment has to rest on your assertion that “Riddles aren’t very different from simple, straightforward sentences,” which is to say, different from those statistically common but, in truth, radically idiosyncratic uses of language in which a speaker intentionally refers to a single particular object or substance present in a context of utterance which the utterance will not outlive. You offer no support for extending the properties of this isolated sort of utterance to the riddle, let alone to language in general.
Now, if we both have a lot of time on our hands (I don’t, but I’m pretty obsessive about these sort of conversations so we’ll see) we might engage in a fruitful discussion about how “language” “works, “ in the broad sense, accounting for all of the kinds of statements that count as language rather than allowing the discussion to be determined by a particular kind of statement that stands for how we’d like language to work rather than how it actually works. Or, it might be better to just focus on the particular example at hand, namely the riddle about water turning to bone. In which case, we could dispense with questions about questions about salt, and just focus on the way riddles do or do not signify.
2) re: “Would they even recognize the foreign words as a riddle?” There’s no need to refer to the context of utterance to identify this riddle as OE. Even if it was written today, that riddle would still be in OE, and could be identified as such by a comparison to all existing languages, past or present. The fact that the riddle may be interpreted as something other than a riddle only serves to underscore the radical indeterminacy at work here. The statement remains, on the most basic level, another sort of riddle - the problem remains how to offer a totalizing understanding of the utterance that accounts for each of its elements, given that the elements don’t seem reconcilable. Whether this problem is resolved by reference to a fictional narrative in which water is magically transformed into bone, or by identifying ice, by a series of metaphorical substitutions, as water become bone, no one could claim to understand the utterance without some de-riddling.
The fact that if you asked 100 people the riddle, they might have any number of reactions is irrelevant. Only the ones who recognize the statement as OE could (or would) claim any understanding of it.
3) re: your two explanations of how some answers still feel like answers, I would suggest a third explanation: riddling is ubiquitous in language, at least in European languages, dating back at least to ancient Greek (the riddle of the sphinx), because, as an inevitable consequence of the most basic hermeneutic operations, even utterances with no clear literal referent continue to signify through rule-governed transformations. There is no need to cite OE culture or contemporary culture as the specific origin of these signifying mechanisms, as they inhere in the basic functioning of language. Utterances signify on their own, independent of context, through the set of rule-governed transformations possible within a linguistic code. Signification does not have to produce an empirical event of understanding (in which, say, 1 of the 100 people you ask identifies a given signification) for it to be at work, silently, invisibly, in the text itself.
4) re: OE scholars today, Adam cites riddle 74 as an example of a riddle on which scholars disagree, and Jennifer Neville cites herself as a real live OE scholar attempting to identify additional answers to these riddles. Anyway, the empirical details of how particular readers engage with the riddle remain, as above, secondary, since they are subject to all sorts of influences other than the meaning of the text - institutional factors, for example, which make understanding OE culture more pressing as a scholarly agenda than definitively deciding on the acceptable answers to riddles. That fact that the riddles remain capable of circulating today as live riddles in posts like this one, for example, suffices to indicate a signifying potential at work in the utterance itself, even when no one is looking at it, that is merely activated by the empirical act of interpretation.
Let me respond to some of your points.
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In fact, in every single context you list, “salt” means something like “a crystalline compound, occurring as a mineral, a constituent of seawater, etc., and used for seasoning food, as a preservative, etc.” and table means something like “an article of furniture consisting of a flat, slablike top supported on one or more legs or other supports.”
Wouldn’t it be more accurate, therefore, to say that context, rather than a constitutive element of meaning, functions as a limiting factor? The examples you’ve chosen suggest that a set of rule-governed decoding operations are possible on any utterance independent of context…
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So, what then does the sentence mean without a context? “Is there salt on the table?” What does that sentence mean without reference to any context whatsoever? We can look up dictionary definitions of each word in the sentence and substitute those definitions for each word, but the sentence will not *mean* anything by itself—without a context. Only in reference to or interpreted within a context does the sentence have meaning.
The same is true of any other utterance or use of language. Utterances and uses of language are more than the sum of their parts—more than the definitions of the words that they use or the syntactic rules that guide their word order. Their context is also a determining factor in their meaning.
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...[I]t hardly follows that all language operates identically to this particular example. Does the same conclusion follow in the case of philosophical language which makes claims towards abstract generalities broader than any particular determinable referent?
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But by referring to “philosophical language,” you have already given it a context within which it means something. If someone were making a grocery list and suddenly added to the list “I think; therefore I am,” what would that “philosophical language” mean? It only has meaning as philosophical language in its context *as* philosophical language. When it’s taken out of that context, it means something else or nothing at all. People use Descartes’s phrase to mean lots of different things in lots of different contexts, much like “Is there salt on the table?” It’s not always “philosophical language,” and its meaning is determined by the context of each use.
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Does the conclusion follow in the case of literature addressed to posterity, i.e. to a context of reception that has not yet even been imagined by the writer?
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Context is necessary for meaning, and meaning can change depending on context, as with “Is there salt on the table?” This is why you can take the OE riddle and make it *your* riddle, removing it from its original context and providing a new context for it. That is what reception is.
When a writer writes for posterity, that writer is imagining a future context for his/her writing. But does the writer control that context? Do writers ultimately control how their works are interpreted and used? Do they control the future context in which their works are read and interpreted?
No, not even in their own lifetimes, much less centuries later.
But even when people read a literary work centuries after it’s written, they read it within the context of its being a great literary work, written for posterity. So, they don’t read it like a grocery list or like a newspaper article or like a “Keep Off the Grass” sign. And its meaning depends precisely on its being read as a great literary work written for posterity. If a man misunderstood Jane Eyre and thought that that novel was contemporary non-fiction, his reaction to the text would be very different from that of a person who recognized it as a work of past literary fiction.
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Does it follow in highly rhetorical language, in which multiple meanings remain in play, even deliberately? Does it follow in cases of language produced without an explicit expressive intention (cases of poetic inspiration, for example, or automatic writing)? Legal documents, contracts, petitions, etc. that can be signed or enforced in contexts vastly differed from those in which they were authored? Mathematical writing and other highly ruled-governed non-referential symbolic systems?
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But in each of these examples, you give a context. Legal documents, for example, can indeed be enforced in contexts vastly different from those in which they were authored, as you say. But they will still be understood in the context of the law. They still only mean what they mean because of the context in which they are interpreted. The reason that they can be still be enforced in contexts different from their original context is that they still *exist* as documents in the context different from their original context. But their meaning won’t be the same.
The U.S. Constitution is still in force today, despite being written centuries ago. We interpret the Constitution in the context of our current social and political situation and climate. I suspect that the Founding Fathers wouldn’t recognize our interpretations of the Constitution as having anything to do with what James Madison wrote, but nonetheless we refer back to their document, reinterpreted in our new context. So, the context makes the document have the meaning that it does now, and that meaning is different from the meaning it had when the Founding Fathers wrote it.
But if someone said to a legal historian that our interpretations of the Constitution are more valid than those of the Founding Fathers, the legal historian, who views the Constitution as an artifact valuable for the insight it gives into
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That fact that the riddles remain capable of circulating today as live riddles in posts like this one, for example, suffices to indicate a signifying potential at work in the utterance itself, even when no one is looking at it, that is merely activated by the empirical act of interpretation.
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I hate to disagree, but I don’t think that your post shows any such thing. What it shows is that antiquarian interest in artifacts can lead us to resurrect past language. How did you come in contact with the OE riddle with which you began? Were you told the riddle by someone on the street? Was it a riddle you heard in a bar? You probably either learned about it in a class on OE or in a book about OE. Those academic sources are not circulating riddles qua riddles; they’re examining artifacts for the purpose of understanding the past better.
Once we’ve come into contact with the riddle, there are at least two contexts within which to interpret it. One context views the riddle as an artifact—something to be interpreted in the context of OE culture and as a window into that culture. This context would seek to find answers to the riddle that would have been available and satisfying to an OE audience.
The other context for interpreting the riddle is the context of modern-day riddles—coopting or appropriating the artifact and reinterpreting it according to responses that would be available and satisfying to an audience today. But if the riddle is interpreted in this way, removed from its OE context, it ceases to be an OE riddle and becomes *your* riddle, a riddle that you are circulating with answers that you choose and validate. It’s no longer the same riddle with the same answers as the OE riddle. You have put it into a new context (one in which we know that milk provides calcium for the development of human bones), and you have interpreted it anew in that context. And other people can understand your riddle and its response because you’re following the social rules of riddling that we know, a context that we recognize. We may even have inherited some of our riddling rules from OE culture (or related cultures), so that we can recognize and appropriate the OE riddle for our own purposes. But our rules also differ from OE rules, making the riddle a different riddle with a different meaning.
1) Re: your comments on the first quote, I’m willing to concede the use of the word “meaning” without necessarily conceding the point. The activity of solving a riddle can be accounted for entirely without the use of the word meaning. Solving a riddle involves a rule-governed transformation of one utterance into another. “Water becomes bone” can be replaced by the answer “ice” by a series of metaphorical or metonymical transfers on the basis of properties of water and bone: water is read literally as water and bone is extended to any solid substance on the basis of the shared property of solidity. Thus “water becomes bone” = “water becomes solid” which is equivalent to ice because it is its definition. No reference to context is necessary, as long as a system of language (in this case, modern English, but the same substitutions would work in OE) is given. Language is its own context - it creates a system of equivalence and difference that allows certain exchanges without a referential moment.
[Quick note: as it turns out, the rule-governed exchanges which get us to “milk” are nearly identical to those which get us to “ice,” except that the word read literally and the word read metaphorically switch places; the answer milk does not involve a disagreement with the OE context over the rules of the game, merely over the set of liquids that can become bone (none vs. milk)]
Whether those non-referential rule governed transformations can properly be called meaning is an interesting question, but not necessarily definitive for my argument. “Meaning” is your word (you introduced it into the comment thread) and I’m willing to stop using it and to adopt another word for the rule-governed transformations involved in solving a riddle. The problem is, you’ve defined meaning as necessarily referential - for the statement about salt to mean something, it must refer to specific salt and a specific table in a specific context of reference. Your argument follows tautologically from this defintion: if the meaning of a statement is its reference, then statements cannot mean without referring. But the kinds of equivalences involving in math problems and riddle solutions do happen independently of a context of reference, so it’s up to you whether to call them “meaning” or not. Interestingly, though, your argument does assume that the word “meaning” itself has a proper meaning that can be determined outside of the context of this comment thread. Otherwise, what happens when you and I disagree about the meaning of meaning? If we are creating the context ourselves, how can we locate the solution to our disagreement over the meaning of our own statement within those statements themselves? Or, does referring to context here simply mean asking the moderator what “meaning” means on The Valve?
2) Next, you do such a good job of running through my example in section 1B of my comment that I almost missed the fact that the argument you were responding to wasn’t really my argument, and I almost starting defending the ridiculous strawman you’ve put me on… So let me clarify my point as well as the relationship between 1A and 1B. I recognize that it’s a bit obscured by the ambiguous transition from A to B ("elbaorating on the last point” - I mean the very last sentence of 1A), and I apologize for that.
Language, I claim/admit, necessarily involves a relationship between the context-independent rule-governed transformations I identify above (from words to the set of possible meanings, from ambiguous syntax to the set of equivalent rearrangements, etc.) and other transformations (such as determination of reference, limitation of semantic meanings, grammatical parsing, etc.) which may be influenced by context but can never be definitively determined by context because no context is ever the definitive context. It’s only because I argue for both types of transformations that I can dispute your claim that “Language doesn’t mean much of anything once removed from its context” while still supporting your claim that utterances “mean different things in different contexts.”
Part 1A of my comment above argues for the existence of context-independent transformations. Part 1B gives examples of texts in which some meanings may be influenced by context, but in which context can never be definitive because no context can be called proper. So it is in fact quite consistent with my argument that you point out that the examples in 1B are still contexts. But if riddles are like any of the contexts in 1B, they do not belong to any context and they are not reducible to any context, even if they are ultimately received in contexts.
A) Even if philosophy is a context, the philosophical text cannot identify its proper context because, in order to claim truth, it must take all possible referents, even those unknown to the philosopher and the philosopher’s culture. This is different from the salt example because no single referent (say, “salt") can be chosen for nouns defining categories (say, “substance"). Similarly, an OE “philosopher” stating that no liquid substance can become bone would be no less incorrect because of a lack of information about milk. If the water/bone riddle were like a philosophical text, it would necessarily have to take all possible referents.
[Frankly, though, I don’t see why “I think therefore I am” would mean anything different on a shopping list. If you understand the words individually and have never taken a philosophy course or even heard of Descartes or even heard the term “philosophy”, you could still piece something together that would somewhat resemble the proper “philosophical” meaning of the text. The language is its own context.]
B) The example of a literary work also does not deny the role of context (I use the word “context of reception” myself) but rather points to a situation in which the immediate context of reception (the author’s time period) does not consitute a privileged context. In a sense, a text addressed to the future does not have an original context. It may still be received in the time period it was written, but it would not belong to that context any more than to the future which received it. It would, in a sense, never belong to either of the contexts and in another sense belong to all contexts. Reception would always be an act of appropriation (making an improper context stand for a proper context) but at the same time, it could never be an appropriation because what it “appropriates” would never have properly belonged to anyone.
If we apply this to the riddle (you make the comparison yourself above), then it would be equally right to say that the riddle never belongs either to the OE context or to the contemporary context properly, and to say that riddle belongs at different times to both contexts, insofar as reception within a context is always an appropriation. Thus the statement I objected to from your original post ("it won’t be an OE riddle anymore; it’ll be *your* riddle") would be both true and false: true in the trivial sense that a bit of language produced in the OE context had been first appropriated by its reception in the OE context, and then reappropriated by the contemporary context; and false in the sense that it never properly belonged to the OE context in the first place, that as a bit of language always addressed to an unknown context, it remained equally available to answers known and unknown to OE culture.
In short, all language belongs to a context in the trivial sense that it cannot be received except by someone somewhere. In this sense, my claim that the riddle “is no one’s,” would be patently absurd. At the moment of reception, it is appropriated. But at the same time, the riddle remains no one’s, in that neither the OE context nor the contemporary context have any proprietary claim to it, neither context is proper, and so the riddle remains no one’s property, properly, even as it is appropriated. To quote my original statement in context, the complete statement is that “the riddle is no one’s, that it no longer depends on its origin for the coherence of an answer“.
[To abbreviate a bit - this would be very similar to my point about legal documents and contacts. They are addressed to a future context in which they are still intended to be valid. Neither context can claim precedence, even if as an empirical fact interpretation must occur within both of them. I won’t say more unless pressed, in part because you’ve left out the very important end of the last sentence of your point there, so I’m not sure where you’re going.]
3) re: “I hate to disagree,” sure you do… re: the rest of it, I think its also putting me on the same argument I distance myself from above, but if I’m wrong, tell me why. (Sorry, this is a long comment and I don’t have the energy to say more)
Perhaps the “immediate context of reception” does not constitute a “privileged” one, but it does constitute a *prior* one. In other words, for a literary work or an OE riddle or any utterance in time, a broad cultural context exists at the time that the work/riddle/utterance is created, and this cultural context (including linguistic, literary, aesthetic, and other parameters) influences the creation, form, and initial interpretation of the work/riddle/utterance. As the work/riddle/utterance is passed on from generation to generation (or from culture to culture), that prior context influences subsequent contexts and interpretations. So, because of the language of the riddle (as compared to every other language ever spoken) and the form of the riddle (as compared to forms of riddles in other cultures) and the history of the riddle (that we learn from teachers and books and archaeological evidence), the riddle is or at least began as an OE riddle. And that context (as an OE riddle), while it doesn’t necessarily have to be privileged, is nonetheless prior to any other context for the riddle.
That’s what I mean when I say that you are appropriating the riddle and giving it a new context. It *does* have a prior context that has existed earlier in time (and even over the course of time in some respects, since subsequent generations, including our own, recognize and identify the riddle as an OE riddle, and that identification is part of its context for us).
You say that “it never properly belonged to the OE context in the first place, that as a bit of language always addressed to an unknown context, it remained equally available to answers known and unknown to OE culture.” But was it really addressed to an unknown context? Didn’t the creator of the riddle expect that his/her first and primary audience would be an OE one? If not, then why tell the riddle in the OE language? Why not tell it through moans and clicks of the tongue that would not be tied to any language or time period or context? Oh, wait. Moans and clicks of the tongue without a context would have no meaning. So, the riddle couldn’t be told that way. Only if the riddle has a context (linguistic, cultural, riddle-al) can it exist and be interpreted and convey meaning.
You say that “the riddle remains no one’s, in that neither the OE context nor the contemporary context have any proprietary claim to it, neither context is proper, and so the riddle remains no one’s property, properly, even as it is appropriated.” In theory, I agree. No context necessarily need be privileged. Reinterpretations of past literary works or OE riddles are sometimes much more interesting and fruitful than the initial interpretations from the time period in which the works/riddles came into existence. A more interesting and fruitful interpretation seems to me to be one that ought to be privileged. And for any culture, an interpretation that “speaks to” that culture is always going to seem more interesting and fruitful than an interpretation that doesn’t “speak to” it.
In practice, however, interpretation (aka meaning) is socially determined and takes place in a historical context. When you interpret the OE riddle, you are aware that it *is* an OE riddle (its prior context). You are also aware of some things about OE and about OE culture (or you would be unable to decode the riddle’s alien linguistic elements). You are also aware of the OE answers to the riddle. All those awarenesses (and more) influence how you approach the riddle, how you interpret it, and why you rebel against its OE context. They are inevitably part of the context in which you interpret the riddle.
You cannot read the words of the riddle ("Wundor wearð on wege: wæter wearð to bane") without being aware that it began its life as an OE riddle. That context has priority (in time and, ultimately, in importance, since it influences or colors subsequent contexts). That’s why I said that giving the riddle to 100 people on the street would illustrate why context is important. If your average Joe on the street doesn’t know the OE context, your average Joe is going to be unable to make sense of or recognize the riddle as anything other than gibberish. He won’t understand the OE language. He won’t understand the conventions of OE riddling, even if you translate the language (but that perhaps doesn’t matter, since we’re not privileging the OE context). He won’t recognize that the riddle even *is* some kind of riddle without being told that it is. He won’t know that he’s supposed to come up with an answer to the riddle. The words that you speak will just hang there in the air. The benefits of making sense of those words will probably not outweigh the effort, and he will decide that you’re some kind of loony and quickly walk away and not make eye contact with you anymore (because that interpretation of your words is the easiest in the social context of your encounter). But provide him with more context (provide him with the OE context or recontextualize the riddle in a way that makes sense to him), and if he’s interested, he’ll find the riddle both easy to interpret and worth thinking about.
You object to the fact that I introduced the concept of meaning and say,
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“Water becomes bone” can be replaced by the answer “ice” by a series of metaphorical or metonymical transfers on the basis of properties of water and bone: water is read literally as water and bone is extended to any solid substance on the basis of the shared property of solidity. Thus “water becomes bone” = “water becomes solid” which is equivalent to ice because it is its definition. No reference to context is necessary, as long as a system of language (in this case, modern English, but the same substitutions would work in OE) is given. Language is its own context - it creates a system of equivalence and difference that allows certain exchanges without a referential moment.
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I find your language here interesting. “Water is read literally as water and bone is extended to any solid substance on the basis of the shared property of solidity.” So, you’re “reading” the word “water” (i.e., assuming or assigning meaning to the word), and you’re extending the *meaning* of “bone” to anything solid. You claim that none of this involves meaning or reference, and yet, you’re assigning meaning and assuming context.
Let’s look more closely at context. How did you know that you could extend the meaning of “bone” to anything solid? You characterize that movement as “a series of metaphorical or metonymical transfers,” but how do you know which such “transfers” are allowable and which are not? How do you know that you shouldn’t extend the meaning of “bone” to “matter,” and therefore the riddle is a tautology (water = matter)?
You *could* come to the conclusion that the riddle’s meaning is that water = matter, but your interpretation would not be socially acceptable, because it ignores social rules about how to use metaphor and how to construct meaningful, witty answers to riddles.
Language didn’t exist before human beings existed. Language *is* social. Meaning *is* social. And because it’s social, it depends on context—on who’s speaking/writing, who’s listening/reading, and what’s going on around them. Let’s go back to “Is there salt on the table?” A mother calls from the kitchen to her child setting the table in the dining room, “Is there salt on the table?” The child responds, “Yes.” The mother comes into the dining room and discovers that there is no salt shaker on the table.
What happens next? The child has responded in a socially unacceptable way (by saying, “Yes,” when the answer should have been “No"). The mother may assume that the child misheard or misunderstood her question and say nothing. The mother may ask the child what the child was thinking by answering, “Yes.” The mother may assume that the child is just being a contrary, spiteful teenager and say nothing. But the mother will judge the child’s use of language inappropriate in some way, whether she confronts the child or not.
In the same way, a socially inappropriate response to the riddle will quickly be labelled inappropriate. In fact, that’s why OE scholars would label “milk” an inappropriate response to the riddle (because according to the norms of their very specialized society, the riddle must be read in its original OE context, a context that precludes “milk” as a response). Some responses will be on the borderlines of acceptability. But the determining factor in their acceptability will be whether they meet social expectations and conventions of language use and interpretation.
I’ve been wondering to myself if our diasgreement is just another version of “If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it....” But I think I’ve decided that it’s not. As I said, language didn’t exist before humans and human society. Trees fell in forests and created sound waves long before humans existed to hear them. So, if a tree falls in a forest and there’s no one there to hear it, it may or may not make a sound, depending on how you define “sound.” But language isn’t a tree that exists independently of human beings. It’s a social creation and a social activity.
Let me begin with the first question you put to me in your latest comment:
But was it really addressed to an unknown context? Didn’t the creator of the riddle expect that his/her first and primary audience would be an OE one?
While I’m not sure I can definitively answer this question in a way that supports my claim, I’m very happy that you asked it. With this question, we move from the general question of how all discourse works to the specific question of how the riddle works, how it signifies, etc. When I suggested, in the hypothetical mode, certain consequences of a riddle being, hypothetically, like a philosophical text, or a literary text, etc. (in each case, making very ungrounded assumptions about what these other sorts of texts were like), I had intended only to respond to your example about salt which claims to demonstrate “how language works” or at least “just not how language works.” At a certain point, responding to these examples requires you to address the similarities and differences between different types of language, particularly with regards to how “context” works to determine meaning in different contexts. Is the riddle like a literary text addressed to an unknown context? Is it like a statement about salt on the table? Or is it even a singular genre, unlike any of these other examples? What exactly is a riddle like, and what role does context play in its production, signification, and reception? Even if we take OE culture as the definitive context in which to address the question of how context signifies in OE riddles (let’s work out the implications of this assumption in a few comments before worrying whether it might be somewhat contradictory), it’s unclear what role the OE culture would grant to context, and whether the OE culture (or even the specific OE riddle culture) is even a coherent, self-identical enough context to provide a definitive answer to the question of context.
Ironically, for all your insistence on context, you’ve been operating on a relatively acontextual theory of context, a universal theory of how “language works” that isn’t sensitive to the fact that different genres in different cultures may work in different ways and may rely on context in different ways. This becomes especially apparent when you acknowledge that the claim of OE scholars to exclude milk from the set of answers to the riddle is itself the result of a specific set of disciplinary norms and conventions, rather than a universal claim about how language works. In the context of contemporary historicist scholarship, another (OE) context intervenes not only in order to establish the set of rules according to which riddles work (OE rules) but also the set of objects that may serve as answers (objects known to OE culture) and the set of properties that may or may not be ascribed to these objects (ex. milk doesn’t build bone).
Instead of universalizing the disciplinary biases of OE historicist scholarship, let’s at least start by trying to determine how the OE contexts might have thought about the role of context in what counts as an answer to a riddle, and moreover, let’s try to evaluate whether such a determination is definitively possible. Not being an OE scholar myself, I’m at a disadvantage in this debate, but I think at the same time, the burden of proof is on you (I would settle for the conclusion that it is impossible to decide whether milk is or isn’t an answer to the riddle, whereas I think you are insisting that the set of answers can be definitively decided on) and I can hold my own in terms of interpreting evidence. Your latest comments offer some reasonable arguments as to why context might have been important in the OE rules of riddling, and these might serve as fine starting points for us to determine whether riddles in general, and especially OE riddles, rely on context in the particular way you claim they do (which is to say, not whether they rely on context at all, which I grant, but rather whether they do so in the way you claim they do). I realize, in other words, that I owe you a response on the rest of your last comment, but I want to see how you respond to this comment first - given your insistence of context as a determinant of interpretation, I hope these terms will be agreeable to you.
That said, I must insist on refusing to talk about salt any more, or even literary texts or philosophical texts or legal texts. Even if language worked identically in every single kind of a text other than the riddle, and all such texts were determined identically by context, there would still remain the possibility that riddles could be the exception to the way language works. If language really works universally the way that you claim it works, then you should be able to prove that riddles work that way too, with evidence specific to riddles.
First, you talk about genre as if it’s something separate from context. You say, “Ironically, for all your insistence on context, you’ve been operating on a relatively acontextual theory of context, a universal theory of how ‘language works’ that isn’t sensitive to the fact that different genres in different cultures may work in different ways and may rely on context in different ways.” But genre is part of (in fact one of the most important parts of) context for any particular utterance.
In a sense, then, you’ve done a rather interesting shift in argument here. You’ve been claiming all along that the OE riddle operates on a completely acontextual basis—on some sort of universal level in which language doesn’t need *anything* as context in order to have meaning—and now suddenly you’re saying that I’m being acontextual by not taking into account the generic context of the riddle. I’ve been the one who has been arguing all along that one cannot interpret the riddle without some sort of context, including its genre and the expectations of that genre.
All along I’ve been saying that meaning cannot exist or be created in a vacuum—that it is social and situational. Genre, culture, social situation/expectations, and linguistic code are all part of the context that determines meaning for any particular use of language. And all those things (genre, culture, social situation/expectations, and linguistic code) are socially determined. A genre, for example, exists because a group of people (i.e., a society) recognizes that certain uses of language are similar to one another and follow certain rules that can be predicted and can convey meaning in a shorthand manner. Once a genre has become solidified, its conventions can become so normative as to seem obvious and natural. No one questions them, and everyone thinks that they’re straightforward, conveying meaning easily and universally to anyone who comes into contact with them.
But that’s only because the genre and its conventions are so common and familiar in the particular society that developed them. To other societies, the conventions may be nonsensical at worst or murky at best—unless the other societies share some of the same conventions and genres.
So, as I’ve been saying all along, in order to interpret the OE riddle qua riddle, one would need to know, among other things,
1.) what the words of the riddle mean (either by decoding the OE language or by having the riddle translated into modern English for a modern English-speaking person),
2.) that the riddle *is* a riddle (since that might not be obvious to someone who doesn’t know the conventions of OE riddles, of the European riddling tradition, or of riddling generally), and
3.) what the conventions of riddling are in the particular social situation in which the riddle is being circulated—e.g., what OE riddling conventions are (if we want to operate within the society of OE scholars and read the riddle solely as an OE artifact) or what riddling conventions are today (if we want to appropriate the riddle for our own time period, joining the society on this website) or a little bit of both.
In my very first posting, I plotted out what at least some of those riddling conventions are and how they affect our interpretation of the riddle:
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One aspect that, I think, everyone has overlooked so far here is the fact that riddles are social activities. When people engage in a riddle, as teller or guesser, they are engaging in an activity controlled by social norms/rules and assumptions. So, when Bilbo Baggins asks his riddle, he and Gollum are aware of the rules of riddling that apply. Likewise, the OE riddlers. But the rules of riddling, being social, change over time and in different cultural contexts. One thing that remains constant perhaps is that the riddle’s answer is supposed to be witty—something surprising and/or clever and/or profound. In OE riddles, the point of the answer is often that one solution—often a bawdy one—immediately suggests itself, but the “correct” solution is innocent. There’s one OE riddle, for example, in which the suggestive language of the riddle makes listeners think that it’s referring to the male sexual organ (long and upright, hairy at the base, makes young girls cry), but in fact, “the answer” to the riddle is an onion.
Answers of riddles have less to do with the teller’s intentionality than with social conventions about riddles. But one of those conventions, another one that seems pretty constant over time, is that the teller determines the correct answer to the riddle. The guesser must come up with an answer that is witty enough to startle the teller into admitting that the guesser’s response is the best response possible. If the teller rules that the guesser’s answer is wrong, the teller must provide the guesser with the right answer—one that is more witty than the guesser’s (and that the guesser will have to admit is wittier). Those are the social rules and norms of riddling.
Let me give an example in the form of a dialogue:
SMART ALEC: What’s black and white and red/read all over?
JOHN: A newspaper.
SMART ALEC: No, a zebra with a sunburn. What’s black and white and red/read all over?
JOHN: A zebra with a sunburn?
SMART ALEC: No, a newspaper.
The teller determines the correct answer, but the teller is limited by the need to be witty and entertain the guesser. If the teller’s “correct” response does not satisfy the guesser, the riddle fails (and I know this, because I have a 12-year-old son who tells many, many failed riddles). The guesser can only win by coming up with the teller’s answer or by coming up with a *better* answer that the teller cannot top.
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Those are some of the relevant and limiting conventions of the genre of riddles. They’ve been there all along in my first posting. I’ve *addressed* the riddle genre and its conventions quite specifically long ago.
My point in later postings was just that riddles are no different from any other use of language in this respect. All uses of language are equally social. A wrong answer or a wrong interpretation or a misunderstanding are all the result of not following the social norms for interpreting particular language in a particular social situation.
So, we’re back to where I came into this conversation, I think. The VERY FIRST POINT I made in this thread was that riddles are social activities (which cannot be completely divorced from their social context if we want them to have any meaning) and that one particular society that interprets the OE riddle today (i.e., that of OE scholars) is viewing it not as a riddle at all but as an OE artifact. And we’re back to what I said in the very first place:
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So, if you want to resurrect an OE riddle and tell it as a riddle again, you may determine what is or is not a correct answer to the riddle. But it won’t be an OE riddle anymore; it’ll be *your* riddle. Personally, I’d rather learn more about OE culture than hear your riddle. To be frank, milk doesn’t seem all that witty to me as an answer.
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You responded to my first message by saying that I was “foreclosing the more radical possibility that, once removed from its original context, the riddle is no one’s, that it no longer depends on its origin for the coherence of an answer.” But I think you missed my point. My point wasn’t that the riddle’s origin in OE times dictates the coherence of its answers; my point was that the social situation in which the riddle is circulated dictates the coherence of its answers—whether we’re talking about the social situation right now on this website or the current situation in OE scholarly circles or the situation in OE times when the riddle was first told or the situation in some future time when the riddle is resurrected yet again.
I’m beginning to think now that you’ve misunderstood my use of the word “context.” You’ve assumed that I always meant “OE context” or “original context” when I’ve said, “context.” But what I’ve meant by “context” is the social situation (at whatever time) in which a piece of language is circulated (or recirculated). *That’s* what determines the meaning of the piece of language.
Sorry for the somewhat long silence. I’m kind of swamped right now, but I’ll be back.
A riddle is a statement or question having a double or veiled meaning, put forth as a puzzle to be solved.
With that said, as surlacarte said sometimes the riddle answer is determined by the teller. That is true, because if it does not garner the expected “punchline” or “ooooooh” then the riddle fails.