Writing riddles is tricky because you don't want to make them too easy, but making them too difficult frustrates people. Write about seashells, seaweed or sea horses if you love the ocean, for instance. Sit back in your chair, close your eyes and visualize yourself as the object of your riddle.

A seashell would smell the salty ocean but not the cookies baking in your oven or the roses in your garden. Search for alternative wording to reference in your riddle without giving the answer. They're an amusing game for children and adults, a connection to history, and a way to approach poetry that avoids the conceit and self indulgence that lays waste to so much of it. By doing so, you can enjoy yourself, sharpen your wits, learn a new way to look at the world, and perhaps tap resources of creativity you never suspected yourself to have. To play the riddle game, two or more people take turns making up riddles on the spot. You win points, or jellybeans, or whatever, by answering riddles correctly we'll present some rules for a modern version of the riddle game later.

If you're feeling uninspired, you can use a riddle you've heard somewhere else, but doing that a lot is considered poor form. At this point, a lot of you are probably thinking improvise poetry? i couldn't possibly! this isn't for me! but you can do it. One of the charms of the riddle game is that it proves that poetry need not be an elite art. I'll show you how to make beautiful riddle poems with simple methods that are play to use, not hard specialized work. The best documented, and the one we'll be taking our model from, is the riddle poem tradition of the anglo saxons, the vikings, and the teutons.

These peoples of the dark ages played the riddle game around their hearth fires for more than five hundred years. Here is a modern english translation of a simple riddle poem, over a thousand years old. It's from a very old manuscript called the book of exeter, which contains a treasury of anglo saxon riddles.

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To appreciate this poem fully, speak it to yourself out loud the slash represents a caesura or pause. Anglo saxon the parent language of english was a rolling, sonorous, thunderous language well suited to poetry and oration. Here's an example of a riddle poem in modern english in very traditional style and subject: note that it doesn't rhyme.

Rhyme is nice in a riddle poem, but strong rhythm what poets call good scansion is better. Actually, traditional riddle poems hardly employed rhyme for structure at all they used an elaborate set of stress rules and a technique called alliteration which we'll describe later on. When you're working on one, try to imagine yourself chanting it to a hall full of drunken vikings. Do they pound the tables and roar? do they laugh? or do they just plain not get it? often you can get the right effect by sticking to muscular one and two syllable words in your poem mdash avoid anything latin sounding or elaborate. Sticking to concrete objects that anyone in a medieval setting might have seen is also a good idea. That said, it's certainly possible to make riddles in the traditional style about modern subjects. Consider these two examples: supposing your viking had ever seen an asphalt road, he'd like this one.