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]
^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.
