Image – Sue Vincent

*

The device of riddling is common to most traditional cultures.

Maidens set riddles for their suitors:

‘What is sweeter than mead…?’

‘What is whiter than snow…?’

‘What is lighter than a spark…?’

*

Antagonists use riddles to settle their disputes:

‘Forty white horses on a red hill first they gnash then they champ then they stand still…?’

‘What is blacker than the raven…?’

‘What is swifter than the wind…?’

*

Divinities play hide and seek with their devotees within the miasmic form of riddles:

‘What dances on the surface of the water…?’

‘What good did Man find on earth that God did not…?’

‘What is sharper than the sword…?’

*

A riddle is one thing, or a collection of things, described as another thing, or a different

collection of things.

It is an extended metaphor without its point of reference.

To solve a riddle is to gain clarity and rid oneself of confusion.

‘Thunder before lightning… Lightning before cloud… Land parching rain… Give me a name.’

*

Solving a riddle allows one to recognise one thing in another and so transcend one or more of

the polarities or categories that apparently govern the perceived world through language and

thought.

A riddle then simultaneously highlights the rigidities of language and its potential

flexibilities.

“A shepherd stands in a field with twenty sheep, how many feet?”

*

Riddles act like little bundles of experience to be untied by the still uninitiated.

The riddler knows something that you do not yet know…

Riddles straddle two or more different frames of reference.

Landscape features are given human attributes and provide ample food for the riddler.

‘I run never walk… My mouth never talks… My head never weeps… In my bed, I never sleep.’

*

The answers are rarely if ever immediately obvious…

Their solution requires contemplation.

Just like crossword clue solutions they are though obvious once you know them.

Unlike crossword clue solutions, there is more often than not a very practical purpose to their solution.

*

If a landscape can have human features then,

why can’t a human have landscape features?

***

Cover Photo – Sue Vincent

***

The Old Stone Monuments that yet hold sway in the remote places of the globe have both folk-lore and mythology associated with them.

In the case of myth the worlds that are purportedly described were current thousands of years after the construction of the monuments and the archaeology does not match the realms so described.

But, still, the associations persist…

Have we become so blinkered in our modern sensibilities we can no longer recognise that which lies before our eyes for what it is?

There is probably only one way to answer this question.

Year of the Pig details a journey around some of the sacred sites of Ireland in search of the deeper truths that still exist in these Blessed Isles…

Now available in Paperback