The featherless bird-riddle is an international riddle type that compares a snowflake to a bird. In the nineteenth century, it attracted considerable scholarly attention because it was seen as a possible reflex of ancient Germanic riddling, arising from magical incantations.[1][2] Although the language of the riddle is reminiscent of European charms,[3] later work, particularly by Antti Aarne, showed that it occurred widely throughout Europe─particularly central Europe─and that it is therefore an international riddle type.[4]Archer Taylor concluded that 'the equating of a snowflake to a bird and the sun to a maiden without hands is an elementary idea that cannot yield much information about Germanic myth'.[5]
Versions
The riddle is first attested in Latin, as the fourth of six anonymous 'enigmata risibilia' ('silly riddles'), known today as the Reichenau Riddles, found in the early tenth-century manuscript Karlsruher Codex Augiensis 205, copied at Reichenau Abbey:
Volavit volucer sine plumis; sedit in arbore sine foliis; venit homo absque manibus; conscendit illum sine pedibus; assavit illum sine igne; comedit illum sine ore.[6]
It flew on wings without feathers; sat in a tree without leaves; a person came without hands; set it in motion without feet; roasted it without fire; consumed it without a mouth.
That is, the snowflake was blown by the wind and melted by the sun.
A representative early-modern German version is:
Es kam ein Vogel federlos, saß auf dem Baume blattlos, da kam die Jungfer mundlos und fraß den Vogel federlos von dem Baume blattlos.
There came a bird featherless sat on the trees leafless There came a maiden speechless And ate the bird featherless From off the tree leafless.
That is, 'the snow (featherless bird) lies on a bare tree in winter (leafless tree), and the sun (speechless maiden) causes the snow to melt (ate the featherless bird)'.[7]
The best known English example runs
White bird featherless Flew from Paradise, Perched upon the castle wall; Up came Lord John landless, Took it up handless, And rode away horseless to the King's white hall.[8]
An Icelandic example runs:
Fuglinn flaug fjaðralaus, settíst á vegginn beinlaus, þá kom maður handlaus, og skaut fuglinn bogalaus.
The bird flew featherless, set itself on a wall legless; then came a handless person, and shot the bird bowless.[9]
Related Research Articles
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The Dancing Water, the Singing Apple, and the Speaking Bird is a Sicilian fairy tale collected by Giuseppe Pitrè, and translated by Thomas Frederick Crane for his Italian Popular Tales. Joseph Jacobs included a reconstruction of the story in his European Folk and Fairy Tales. The original title is "Li Figghi di lu Cavuliciddaru", for which Crane gives a literal translation of "The Herb-gatherer's Daughters."
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↑ Antti Aarne, Vergleichende Rätselforschungen, 3 vols, Folklore Fellows Communications, 26–28 (Helsinki/Hamina: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1918–20), III 3–48.
↑ Archer Taylor, 'The Riddle', California Folklore Quarterly, 2.2 (April 1943), 129-47 (pp. 141-42).
↑ Tomas Tomasek, Das deutsche Rätsel im Mittelalter, Hermea: Germanistische Forschungen, Neue Folge, 69 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994), p. 119. For another edition and English translation, see The Old English and Anglo-Latin Riddle Tradition, ed. and trans. by Andy Orchard, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, 69 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021), pp. 602-3.
↑ Dominik Landwehr, review of Simpliciana: Schriften der Grimmelshausen Gesellschaft 2014, ed. by Peter Heßelmann (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2015), in Cryptologia, 41 (2017), 92–96.
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