Riddles (Finnic) facts for kids
The corpus of traditional riddles from the Finnic-speaking world (including the modern Finland, Estonia, and parts of Western Russia) is fairly unitary, though eastern Finnish-speaking regions show particular influence of Russian Orthodox Christianity and Slavonic riddle culture. The Finnish for 'riddle' is arvoitus (pl. arvoitukset), related to the verb arvata ('guess').
Riddles provide some of the first surviving evidence for Finnic literature. Finnic riddles are noteworthy in relation to the rest of the world's oral riddle canon for their original imagery, and the interesting collision of influences from east and west; along with the attestation in some regions of an elaborate riddle-game.
The archives of the Finnish Literature Society contain texts of 117,300 Finnish-language riddles collected from oral tradition, some of which are in Kalevala metre; meanwhile, the Estonian Folklore Archives contain around 130,000 older traditional riddles, along with about 45,000 other riddle-type folklore, such as conundra, initial letter puzzles, droodles, etc.
Form
Most traditional Finnish and Estonian riddles consist of a simple pair of statements, like 'kraatari menee läpi kylän, eikä sanoo hyvää huomenta' ('the tailor goes through the village without saying good morning'), whose answer is 'needle and thread without an end knot' (collected in Naantali in 1891); the common 'isä vielä syntymässä, kuin lapset laajalle liikkuu' ('the father is just being born when the sons are already fighting a war'), to which the answer is 'fire and sparks' (this example being from Joroinen from 1888); or the Estonian 'Üks hani, neli nina?' ('One goose, four noses?'), to which the answer is 'padi' ('a pillow’). Very few include an explicit question like 'what is the thing that...?' They are generally set apart from everyday language by distinctive syntactic tendencies.
Many riddles are in Kalevala metre, such as this example of the internationally popular 'Ox-Team Riddle' collected in Loimaa in 1891:
|
Kontio korvesta tulee |
From the backwoods comes a bruin |
At times riddles allude to traditional mythology, mostly through passing reference to people, beings or places, and to other poetic genres such as elegy or charms.
Early attestations
Records of riddles provide some of the earliest evidence for Finnish-language literature: the first grammar of Finnish, Linguae Finnicae brevis institutio by Eskil Petraeus (1649) included eight illustrative riddles, including 'caxi cullaista cuckoi ylitze orren tappelewat' ('two golden cocks fight over a beam'), the answer to which is 'eyes and nose', and 'Pidempi pitke puuta | matalambi maan ruoho' ('taller than a tall tree | lower than the grass of the earth'), to which the answer is 'a road'. Later, in 1783, Cristfried Ganander published 378 riddles under the title Aenigmata Fennica, Suomalaiset Arwotuxet Wastausten kansa, arguing that 'one can see from these riddles that the Finnish people think and describe as accurately as any other nation, and that their brains are no worse than others'. And from these riddles we also learn of the richness and aptness of the Finnish language in explaining all manner of things'.
Social contexts
Riddles were a common form of entertainment for the whole household in the Finnish-speaking world into the 1910s and 1920s, but new entertainments, the obsolescence of the traditional riddle stock caused by changing material and economic norms, the increasing unfashionability of Kalevala-metre, and changes to family structures associated with urbanisation, led to their demise as a mainstream form of entertainment. Riddles were generally learned by heart, and often their solutions too, such that guessing a riddle was not always strictly a test of wits.
Much of the Finnish region (but not Estonia) also attests to a distinctive riddle game, alluded to already in Ganander's 1783 collection.
Images for kids
-
Map showing the distribution of the Finnic languages, approximating the area where the Finnic riddles were found
