Riddle

A riddle is a folklore genre — a concise allegorical description of an object or phenomenon that must be guessed from metaphorical hints: 'Without windows, without doors — a hut full of people' (a cucumber, a pumpkin). The riddle is built on metaphor, metonymy, parallelism, and the unexpected juxtaposition of distant concepts, developing observation and figurative thinking. Genetically, the riddle is connected with the ancient 'secret language' of hunters and initiation rites. There are riddles about nature, the human being, the household, and abstract notions. Ukrainian riddles were collected and edited by Ivan Berezovsky in the foundational edition 'Riddles' (1962), as well as by Matvii Nomys. The poetics of the riddle — a metaphorical 'renaming' of the world — nourished the imagery of Baroque poetry, and its structure was studied by Oleksandr Potebnia.