Riddles Wisely Expounded
by J. Barre Toelken
Western Folklore, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Jan., 1966), pp. 1-16
[This informative article is not about Child No. 1, although it is included. It's about riddles and metaphors in ballads.]
"Riddles Wisely Expounded"
[ The present article is an expansion of a paper read at the Western Regional Convention of the American Folklore Society, at Logan, Utah, July 19, 1963.]
J. BARRE TOELKEN
THE NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE OF RIDDLE BALLADS (cf. H530-H889) differs from that of conventional traditional ballads in that the story is implied, not from a series of "montages" of varying focus,[1] but from a sequence of riddles posed, and from the way in which this sequence is presented in a frame of reference, a rationale, for the questions.
For example, "King John and the Bishop," (Child No. 45), uses death as a penalty for the wrong answer in an attempt to impose a serious dramatic framework on a collection of otherwise ordinary riddles or conundrums, just as Chaucer's use of the frame-story technique lends richness and unity to a group of originally unconnected tales. The result is a ballad in which the psychological dilemma of the Bishop is the "emotional core," to use Coffin's term; as the dilemma is resolved, the characters gain stature. The type seems generally akin to the storied Oedipus riddle, in which the question and its answer are almost whimsical out of context but deadly serious in their frame of reference, just as in the Vaf prunismal the riddles are not in themselves ominous but take on a dramatic tension from the ever-present penalty of beheading for the loser of the contest.
Odin escapes only by resorting to a "neck-riddle," the answer to which only the poser can know. In ballads such as "Captain Wedderburn's Courtship" (Child No. 46), on the other hand, the same sort of dramatic interplay between the contestants is turned to humor by their opposite sex, and by a threatened "penalty" of copulation or marriage. In this ballad, furthermore, many of the riddles are themselves highly suggestive of the ballad's theme, which is, of course, the attempt of a man to bed a women "neist the wa'." To such questions as "what's higher than the tree?" and "what's deeper than the sea?" (Child A. 12), the Captain replies: "Heaven" and "Hell" (H660). But in the Southern Appalachian area "tree" is often used as either a metaphor or a euphemism for "penis," as it is in the Scottish original of the song "John Anderson My Jo":
John Anderson, my jo, John,
When first that ye began,
Ye had as good a tail-tree
As ony ither man;
But now it's waxen wan, John,
And wrinkles to and fro,
And aft requires my helping hand,
John Anderson, my jo.[2]
(This connotation of the term is also very likely the key to the Faroese riddle: What tree grows with its roots up and its top hanging down? Ans. An icicle).[3] Among North Carolina loggers the author heard the riddle "What is deeper than the sea?" bring the answer, "Vagina-it can't be fathomed." In A, verse 12, the lady asks for "winter fruit that in December grew," and for "a silk mantil that waft gaed never through." Both of these, phrased as conundrums and with certain simple but vivid differences in terminology, were current among rural men in Buncombe County, North Carolina, in the summer of 1953, and there seems to be no reason to believe they are anything but traditional. Their proper answers were, respectively, "penis" or "baby," and "pubic hair."
Captain Wedderburn manages to avoid such direct reference by stating only that his father has such a fruit, and his mother such a mantle; his pointed avoidance of the concretely suggestive answer in this otherwise clearly stated sequence of riddles indicates that the audience could be expected to recognize the allusion. The story line in "Captain Wedderburn's Courtship" is thus reinforced by a constant metaphorical reference to body parts and passions. A tension is set up, further, by the disparity between the answer as given and the answer as vividly suggested but unstated.
In all versions of "Riddles Wisely Expounded" (Child No. 1) collected in the United States and England, many of the above riddles are found, and of these, most develop the same or similar implications, except that the young maid in this instance does stop the advances of her antagonist by answering all his riddles. Her dilemma is the more severe because, depicted as a virgin trying to fight off the forces of evil (sex especially), she must not only give an acceptable answer to each riddle, but in those cases where there are two diametrically opposed possibilities, she must give the pure and virginal one. Again, there is the humorous tension in the minds of the listeners between the obscenity inherent in the way the riddle is posed and the almost naive innocence in her answer.
In still another type, represented in Child by "Proud Lady Margaret" (No. 47), a curious combination of themes-death and sex-is presented in a series of riddles, very much on the order of neck-riddles, which are posed by an unsuspecting and amorous sister to a revenant brother who, despite her attempts to tell him his answers are wrong, knows all the while that he is right. The implication is made that previous suitors have lost their lives for giving the wrong answers, and the poetic result, of course, is irony when, after getting the answers right, this suitor reveals himself as her own dead brother.
A fourth type, unlike any of the above except for subject matter, poses a series of ambiguous riddles which are left unanswered; an example of this type, generally unrecognized by scholars as belonging in the riddle ballad grouping, is discussed in detail below.
The significance of the riddle ballad is not merely that it is a species of dramatic poetry-song in which highly varied small enigmas are presented in a meaningful and often ironic sequence. Structurally, such an observation is, of course, extremely important; of moment here, however, is that, as seen in the examples above, there is in many riddle ballads a metaphorical ambiguity which allows for the development of at least two levels of understanding. When these are seen to be arranged in a plot structure in which both levels are coherent, or so that one level effectually reinforces or enhances the other-as in the case of "Captain Wedderburn's Courtship," for example there is good reason for the scholar to suspect that the form is one which has been evolved with some care, and that it represents an aspect of balladry which merits closer investigation. It would seem to refute the insistence of Gerould and Wimberly that ballads tend not to be metaphorical and figurative, and it would tend to support James Reeves' thesis that folk song utilizes "a fund of imagery which belongs not to the mind of a single poet but to the hidden emotional life of all who speak and know English." [4]
Most would agree that the so-called "Kentucky Riddle Song," a descendant of "Captain Wedderburn" extremely popular in the United States, is a delightful song in its own right and that the answers to its riddles are pleasantly homey and rural. But, knowing the courting customs of the rural Old World and of the American frontier (to say nothing of modern urbia), who would insist that the sequence: cherry,[5] egg, ring,[6] and baby, is an accidental one? In fact, the suspicion that the sequence refers to impregnation is strengthened by a variant answer listed by Cecil Sharp in his manuscript.
In place of the usual "a baby when it's sleepin' has no cryin'," Sharp notes that a Mr. Thomas's version went: "when the baby's in the belly, there's no cry within." [7] It was probably not coincidental, then, that when I first heard the "Riddle Song" sung by country folk near Grassy Branch, North Carolina, a girl sang the first and third lines of verse one in alternation with a boy who sang the second and fourth lines. In the second verse, the boy began with "How can there be a cherry without a stone?" and in the third verse the girl began again with her innocent answer, "A cherry when it's bloomin'...."
That other versions have a "story without an end" for the ring, as well as other differences in wording, does not in the least alter the fact that some traditional singers have seen and maintained in the song a certain coherence of ambiguities. Reeves notes in discussion of a Cecil Sharp variant collected in England-"Pery Mery Winkle Domine"-that Partridge lists "periwinkle" as a mid-Nineteenth Century low colloquialism for "the female pudend." [8] It might be added that Maria Leach lists the periwinkle plant as an aphrodisiac.[9] It is, of course, impossible to say that all these possibilities must have been present in the minds of all the folk singers who have passed along their versions of these riddles; on the other hand, given the common understanding of these terms in colloquial language, and given the neat coherence often observable in riddle sequences, it is possible to observe that in many cases folk beliefs, colloquial metaphors and ambiguous figures of speech were utilized in the construction of humorously dramatic episodes dependent for their impact on double meanings.
Double-entendre in riddles is neither a new idea nor a recent discovery by scholars. It has been observed for many years, but few have dared deal with it critically in print. Archer Taylor comments, "A trick characteristic of riddling at all times has been the description of an erotic scene with the intent of confusing the hearer by an entirely innocent answer," [10] but does not study the form in any detail. There is no way of determining how long men have concerned themselves orally with double riddles, but a few specimens from the Old English Exeter Book will serve as an indication of the antiquity of printed texts.
For example: Riddle 25: I am a wonderful creature, bringing joy to women, and useful to those who dwell near me. I harm no citizen except only my destroyer. My site is lofty; I stand in a bed; beneath, somewhere, I am shaggy. Sometimes the very beautiful daughter of a peasant, a courageous woman, ventures to lay hold on me, assaults my red skin, despoils my head, clamps me in a fastness. She who thus confines me, this curly-haired woman, soon feels my meeting with her-her eye becomes wet.-
Ans. an onion.
Riddle 44: A strange thing hangs by a man's thigh under its master's clothes. It is pierced in front, is stiff and hard, has a good fixed place. When the man lifts his own garment up above his knee, he wishes to visit with the head of this hanging instrument the familiar hole which it, when of equal length, has often filled before.-
Ans. a key."
While modem riddles tend to run much shorter than these examples, one still finds the same double approach. Sometimes the underlying "off-color" theme is seen in the ambiguity of the phrasing of a single riddle:
It goes in dry and comes out wet,
It tickles your stomach and makes you sweat.
-Ans. a washboard [12]
or:
The old woman pidded it and padded it;
The old man took off his britches and jumped at it.
-Ans. a feather bed.[13]
The widespread currency of such riddles is attested to by recent studies of non-Western folklore genres; see, for example, Maung Than Sein and Alan Dundes, "Riddles from Central Burma," JAF, LXXVII (January-March, 1964), 69-75, especially two riddles on p. 72: "A pineapple" and "A cheroot." Probably Reverend Walter Gregor, in his Notes on the Folk-Lore of the North-East of Scotland (London, 1881), reproduced the following riddle because he did not understand it:
It's lang an it's roon,
An it's as black's coal,
Wi' a lang and a plump hole?
-Ans. a bottle.[14]
Prose riddles in the form of orally circulating jokes often capitalize on the suggestive context of an ambiguous sequence, such as in the story of the psychiatrist who asked all his patients but three questions: (1) What does a dog do in your front yard that you don't want to step in? (2) What does a man do standing up, a woman sitting down, and a dog on three legs? (3) What is a four-letter word, ending in "k", meaning "intercourse"? His expected answers were: (1) dig holes; (2) shake hands; (3) "talk."
"But you'd be surprised at the crazy answers I get."
The fact that the possible levels of interpretation are not always as blatant as this in the riddle ballads would not rule out their use and detection by a group of people who are familiar with the frame of reference. Witness the young girl who in great embarrassment gave the following riddle to Vance Randolph and Mary Celestia Parler, remarking as she did so that it was "not very nice":
Riddledy, riddledy, riddledy rye,
Old Lady only got one eye;
Runs in and out of every gap,
Leaves her tail in every trap.
-Ans. a needle.[15]
Obviously her own knowledge of the "other" answer impeded her willingness to pose the riddle out loud for the collectors. Without an explanation one can only wonder just what part of the image was the suggestive key to the other level; perhaps because of the ambiguous way in which the eye can be described, the crux lies in the second line.[16] In the Medieval riddles of the cleric Claret, for example, appear the following two:
A vessel have I that is round like a pear, moist in the middle,
surrounded by hair; and often it happens that water flows there.
-It is only my eye, and I frequently cry. (LXXXII)
My riddle consists of living baths, their entrances covered with hair:
one washes within, two strike without.
-The tongue inside the mouth, and the eyes in their two recesses. (XXXVII) [17]
Whether these riddles explain the hesitance of the young girl from Arkansas is immaterial here; the main point is made by Frederic Peachy in his notes on Riddle XX in Clareti Enigmata, in which he observes that the aim of such riddles (30% to 40% of Claret's fall into this category) is to evoke "... a salacious image in the listener's mind and then to release his inhibition in a burst of laughter by giving an innocent answer." [18]
Add to this the possibilities for dramatic irony when such riddles are incorporated into the framework of a story, and a clearer picture of riddle ballad potential emerges. The following ballad, "The Cambric Shirt," an Ozark variant of "The Elfin Knight" (Child No. 2), stands as an example. A line-by-line examination of the traditional allusions, while hampered to some extent by our lack of knowledge concerning the actual qualities of metaphorical expression among ballad singers, may serve to suggest broadly the depth and significance of the riddle ballad form. The basis of operation in the following discussion is the willingness to believe that the impossible-sounding items and situations mentioned in the ballad are true riddles with answers which can be-or could have been-fruitfully sought, recognized, and appreciated by a ballad audience, based on its acquaintance with its own folklore.
I choose this ballad because, to my knowledge, it has not yet been seriously considered as a riddle ballad,[19] and yet an examination of it leads to some valuable observations on riddle ballads as a class, and on metaphor in balladry as a whole. This particular version is picked over others as a point of departure because it was collected recently from oral tradition by the late Joan O'Bryant, who kindly consented to let me use it in print; thus we are assured that we are examining a folklore text which has not been tampered with by editors or transcribers who might conceivably (if unintentionally) have altered the wording in such a way as to render it unreliable for folkloristic study. "The Cambric Shirt" was collected by Miss O'Bryant (who at the time of her accidental death in 1964 was to assume a position at Fort Lewis College, Durango, Colorado) from Mrs. Allie Long Parker, at Hogscald Hollow, Arkansas.
THE CAMBRIC SHIRT
"As you go up to yonders town,
Rosemary and thyme,
Go give my love and best respects to that young lady,
And tell her she'll be a true lover of mine.
"Tell her to make me a cambric shirt,
Rosemary and thyme,
Without any seam or needleswork,
And she shall be a true lover of mine.
"Tell her to wash it in yonders well,
Rosemary and thyme,
Where water never flowed, nor rain never fell,
And she shall be a true lover of mine.
"Tell her to hang it on yonders thorn,
Rosemary and thyme,
That never was budded since Adam was born,
And she shall be a true lover of mine."
"As you go up to yonders town,
Rosemary and thyme,
Go give my love and best respects to that young man,
And tell him he'll be a true lover of mine.
"Tell him to buy me five acres of land,
Between the salt sea and lay sea sand.
"Tell him to plow it with a muley cow's horn,
And seed it all over with one grain of corn.
"Tell him to reap it with a sickle of leather,
And gather it in on a pea-fowl's feather.
"Tell him to thrash it on yonders wall,
And for his life let one grain fall.
"Tell him to take it to yonders mill,
And every grain must one barrel fill.
"Tell him when he has done this work,
To come to me for his cambric shirt."
In "The Cambric Shirt" there are two basic levels of meaning: the narrative, and what may be called the figurative. The narrative thread is quite simply restated: The young man sets forth three humorously impossible tasks for the girl to perform before she can qualify as his true-love. In apparent indignation she indicates with sarcastic humor her lack of interest (or her assertion of independence) by setting several impossible tasks for him before he can be worthy of her efforts. As Child notes (I, 8-14), the cancelling of impossible tasks by setting one's opponent a series of equally or more impossible tasks is well known in the folklore of Europe. But a closer scrutiny of this particular manifestation of that motif reveals that in the light of certain beliefs and figures of speech the tasks themselves are ambiguous, and that they thus suggest other possibilities for interpretation.
A figurative level, therefore, is derived from the tenor of the riddles themselves. Because the herbs mentioned in the refrain are traditional funerary herbs in Britain (as are parsley and sage, found in the refrains of other variants),[20] and because the term "Yonders Town" (as well as "Marble Town" and "Tarry Town") is used as a euphemism for the graveyard in the southern United States, there is a distinct possibility that the cambric (linen) shirt is a reference to the shroud, especially since it would have no seam. In a close parallel, the author has heard the figure of speech, "Watch out-you'll be wearing a sleeveless shirt (buttonless shirt)!" used to mean "Watch outyou'll kill yourself." In "Geordie" (Child No. 209), the protagonist, awaiting his death, sends a messenger to his lady:
You may tell her to sew me a gude side shirt,
She'll no need to sew me mony;
Tell her to bring me a gude side shirt,
It will be the last of any. (D.4)
In the Swedish and Faroese versions of "Babylon" (Child No. 14) there is a distinct connection between a shirt, and death, and loss of virginity.[21] A sark is equated with a winding sheet in No. 73.E 36; No. 238.F.4; No. 96. A.23. Parallels are seen in a riddle given by Gregor (p. 79) which describes a coffin in terms of a coat, and in one of the songs from Cecil Sharp's MSS entitled "The Tailor by his Trade" (probably from a broadside) which has the lines:
And now she's dead and her tongue lies still
She must wear the wooden breeches.[22]
But, conversely, rosemary, sage, and thyme are herbs also used in divining and influencing lovers: On St. Agnes' Day, take a sprig of rosemary, and another of thyme, and sprinkle them thrice with water: in the evening put one in each shoe, placing a shoe on each side of the bed, and say the following lines when you retire to rest, and your future husband will appear-
"St. Agnes that's to lovers kind,
Come, ease the trouble of my mind." [23]
Maria Leach notes (p. 957) that rosemary was used in both funeral and wedding ceremonies, and that in Germany brides wore it to guard against pregnancy. In Sharp's MS version of "Rosemary Lane" a young girl living in a place of that name is easily seduced by a sailor. Thyme is listed as an aphrodisiac by Wedeck,[24] as it is by Norman Douglas, along with parsley, sage, savory, and camomile.[25] In a Middle English translation of a Latin herbal we find that sage was recognized as a purgative for the menses, as an abortifacient, and that it will "... destroie pe icche of pe c--te and of a mannes yerde if it be ofte wassh ]er-dip." [26]
The sark, too, has associations with lovers. In two versions of "Clark Colvill" (Child No. 42), the mermaid is washing a silken sark, apparently as a means of allurement. Child mentions a Gaelic poem in which a seamless white robe is used as a test for an unchaste wife: it will not cover one guilty of infidelity (Child I, 261). And, interestingly enough, a woman of local infamy and gigantic appetites in Asheville, North Carolina was described to me by a native logger as "just like wearin' a great big wool shirt with no sleeves." If all these references have any connection, they would seem to indicate that the answer to be given would be "shroud," while the answer to be understood would be that part of the female anatomy referred to in "Captain Wedderburn's Courtship" as "a silk mantil that waft gaed never through." [27] The apparent incongruity between death on the one level and sex on the other will be discussed below.
The well where water never flowed "nor rain never fell" would be, on the surface level, the grave. The OED lists an archaic use of "well" as any pit dug in the ground. And parallel terminology is used in the ballad "The Three Ravens" (Child No. 26), in which a knight is buried in "the earthen lake," which may be a derivation of the Latin Vulgate lacus, "a pit or den"- itself quite ambiguous; the OED notes that "lake" has been used occasionally to mean a grave. Partridge gives "to take an earth bath" as a slang term for "to die," and the Middle English Debate of the Body and the Soul develops a parallel image in reference to the grave.
While such appellations seem to verge on the kenning,[28] they are more likely to represent euphemisms for taboo references to death, in the same spirit with which "Marble Town" (above) is employed. The anatomical referent of "well," if indeed it is intended, should be clear enough. There appears to be a parallel usage in some versions of "Lord Thomas and Fair Annet" (Child No. 73) when the heroine, replying to the Brown Girl's query of where she got the cloth or the water to make her complexion so light and clear, says in some versions she got it from her mother's womb (A, E, G, and perhaps by implication in B. 31: "Aneath yon bouer o bane"), and in other versions that she got it from a well in her father's yard (G, H, and in Bronson, Tunes, II 130, item No. 87). The well image in folklore also links together such presumably opposed concepts as death and love in beliefs concerning marriage divination. Hand, in Vol. VI of the Brown Collection, lists the common tradition that if a person looks down an old well on the first of May, using a mirror to throw the beams of the sun on the water, he will see the face of his future wife (or husband); if the person is to die unwed, he will see a coffin.[29]
The next enigma is the thorn that never was budded since Adam was born. On the most innocent level this is, of course, a reference to a thorn bush, but the word "thorn" itself may have a variety of nuances for the listener. Though the etymology of the word is not totally clear, it seems to have been derived from a root which designated something hard. World Dictionary prefers to derive it from *ster, to be stiff, to be rigid," while Skeat[30] traces it to the Aryan Tar, to bore, to pierce, "so the sense is 'piercer.'" Since the first two hypothetical answers (above) seem to be "shroud" and "grave," perhaps the answer here is "body," or "corpse." Again, it is possible that recognition of the figure here depends on the listener's ability to detect a kenning-like appellation; the Old English gar-beam, literally "spear-tree," comes to mind as a parallel, though doubtless unrelated, kenning for man or warrior.
On the figurative level, "thorn" (and "horn" in other variants[31]) can mean, archaically, any hard protuberance on the human body, and thus the anatomical referent is again clear.[32] The holy well with a thorn bush growing beside it is a well-known scene in folklore, and modern survivals and superstitions suggest that such wells were used to cure diseases and to promote fertility in women. The cure often involved (and in some areas of Scotland still does) dipping a linen (cambric) rag in the well, stroking it on the affected part of the body, then hanging the cloth on the nearby thornbush.[33] The Brown Collection mentions a belief in North Carolina that if a person washes a handkerchief and leaves it on a sage brush to dry, the next morning the initials of his (her) future mate will be found on it (VI, 621, No. 4567). Vance Randolph cites an Ozark belief that the hawthorn indicates a bad omen if touched while budded; apparently there is some connection between this action and "sexual misadventures-rapes and unfortunate pregnancies and disastrous abortions. ..." [34] Is there a suggestion here that touching an unbudded hawthorn might presage normal sexual contacts? Certainly the first three enigmas of "The Cambric Shirt" are worded in such a way as to bring up in the listener's mind a rich fabric of traditional associations, most of them concerned with death and sex.
The ballad has thus far set one problem on the narrative level, has implied a rather ominous, but coherent, subject-death-in the riddles given, and has allowed for the comprehension of still another subject-sex-by the use of ambiguous questions. It is significant to note that the referents on the first figurative level, i.e., shroud, grave, corpse, fit together as coherently as do the anatomical referents on the second, and that neither of these levels seems to have any overt connection to the invitation and refusal which form the basis for the narrative.
The modern critic might conclude somewhat hastily that the ballad makers had at one time taken interest in Renaissance poetry and had adopted for their own use the peculiar metaphysical oxymoron of death-in-sex. However, a more likely answer lies in the more primitive folklore of Northern Europe, in which, in times long past, men had developed the belief (based in part, many have suspected, on the ebb and flow of the seasons) in death as an immutable prerequisite of fertility, abundance, life itself. Frazer mentions a curiously similar rite which seems to have been enacted regularly in Lusatia in relatively recent times: the women make an effigy of Death, clothe it in a white shirt, and put a broom and a scythe in its hands. The doll is then torn apart, buried, and the shirt is hung on a tree, accompanied by singing and celebration. Frazer comments:
If the tree which is brought back as an embodiment of the reviving vegetation of spring is clothed in the shirt worn by the Death which has just been destroyed, the object certainly cannot be to check and counteract the revival of vegetation: it can only be to foster and promote it.[35]
Primitive man, and his medieval descendants, and his modern-day grandchildren in rural areas, very likely did not make the extreme distinction between planting seed and "planting" bodies that more sophisticated people make today. The combination of themes very likely strikes the modern ballad reader as bordering on the oxymoronic, while among the "folk" audience the fusion of images would result in what the critic would call rich poetic texture.[36]
The girl's refusal follows a pattern similar to that of the boy's approach. On the narrative level she implies that she is not interested. The tasks she sets for him, seen as real tasks, are of course impossible; seen as riddles, however, most of them can be answered right out of Frazer's Golden Bough. The use of a single seed or tuft of seed, the extreme care taken with certain sheafs at harvest, the plowing of a small ritual row, are all quite familiar to folklorists. Reaping with a sickle of leather brings to mind the flail, with which the grain was "beheaded," and with which the last sheaf was often threatened during the harvest rites. A custom in vogue in the North of Scotland at the turn of the century called for the reaper of the last sheaf to be beaten with the flails, and Professor Henry Wenden, of Ohio State University, recently suggested to the author in a letter that the leathern thongs found in the graves of the Danish peat-bog man (such as Tollund Man) may well have been used as the tools of an analogous ritual killing. The sexual connotations of reaping and mowing are well known, but perhaps a verse from broadsheet tradition will set them in perspective for this study:
With courage bold undaunted she took him to the ground,
With his taring scythe in hand to mow the meadow down;
He moved from nine to breakfast time, so far beyond his skill,
He was forced to yield and quit the field, for the grass was growing still.[37]
That the sickle should be made of leather makes the riddle both more vivid and more susceptible to solution. In the broadside "Mutton and Leather," (Pinto and Rodway, pp. 419-420) leather is used in the sense of penis, while in the song "As I Came O'er the Cairney Mount," (p. 417) the connection is reversed:
The Highland laddie drew his dirk
And sheath'd it in my wanton leather.
The latter is reminiscent of a version of "The Elfin Knight" recorded recently in Sussex, England, by Peter Kennedy (on Caedmon Records, The Folksongs of Britain, Vol. IV), in which the man "reaped it with the blade of his knife," and later, it may be added, "winn'd it on the tail of his shirt." The impossibility of every grain filling one barrel is turned to plausibility if it is seen as a reference to liquid made from the grain. In Silva Gadelica, for example, there appears a similar allusion when King Dermot asks his magicians to prophesy the manner in which he will die. One tells him he will be slaughtered, and that his shroud will be a shirt grown from a single flaxseed and a mantle of one sheep's hair. The second tells him that he will drown, and that before he dies he will drink ale "brewed of one grain of corn." [38] The manner in which these and other prophecies come true is rather unlikely and unnatural, but the apparent impossibility of each is eliminated by the way in which it occurs.
Over-all, the girl has selected for her riddles questions which utilize the traditional references to fecundity, planting, and harvest, and they seem to reinforce the surface (narrative) animosity between the two young people by taking advantage of the natural contrast between images of death (suggested by him) and images of life (suggested by her). However, the distinction between life and death, as mentioned above, need not be in folklore a sharply delineated opposition; and it will be remembered that the death references of the boy were shot through with undertones of sex. Thus it is both interesting and significant to observe that the girl's images of plowing, planting, reaping, and milling are all far more salaciously ambiguous than even those of her suitor; that is to say, their possible interpretations are more easily recognizable for what they are.
In Child version A, the young girl brings on the advances of the knight by wishing "that horn were in my kist, / Yea, and the knight in my armes two." At once the knight appears by her bed; both her wish, in its vocabulary, and her environment are important here. It is no puzzle to decide what she means by her "aiker of good ley-land, / Which lyeth low by yon sea-strand" (one is reminded of the old proverb: "One acre of possession is worth a whole land of promise"), and it then comes as no surprise to hear her tell the knight:
For thou must eare it with thy horn,
So thou must sow it with thy corn.[39]
To plow, or ear another man's land has traditionally meant to commit adultery, and to put a sickle in another man's corn has had the same application. In the case of the present ballad, there is no hint of adultery, but the rest of the image is functional. "To plow" is still in common usage today among men as a crude way of denoting "to copulate with," and its currency as easily understood metaphor is attested to by Shakespeare, among others.
In All's Well, I:3, there is the passage:
He that ears my land spares my team and gives me leave to inn the crop.
If I be his cuckold, he's my drudge.[40]
Reeves presents a Sharp MS version of "I Sowed Some Seeds" which has the following lines:
I sowed some seed, all in some grove,
All in some grove, there grows no green.. [41]
There is no surprise when the girl subsequently becomes pregnant. The reaping and milling terms to be found in nearly all versions of the ballad are common also in many "off-color" folk songs and broadsides; the metaphor usually presents a girl who goes to the farmer to see his threshing machine, or one who goes to the miller to have her grain ground and who comes home later swearing "she'd been ground by a score or more, but never been ground so well before,"[42] Some of the ramifications of the ancient tradition which connects womankind with milling were explored more than a century ago by a German scholar:
... In der symbolischen Sprache bedeutet aber Miihle das weibliche Glied (JvXXos, wovon mulier), und der Mann ist der Miiller, daher der Satyriker Petronius molere mulierem fur Beischlaf gebraucht.... Der durch die Buhlin der Kraft beraubte Samson muss in der Miihle mahlen... welche Stelle der Talmud ... wie folgt commentirt: Unter dem Mahlen ist immer die Sunde des Beischlafs zu verstehen. Darum standen am Feste der keuschen Vesta in Rom all Miihlen still.... 1st nun erwiesen, dass jeder Mann ein Miiller, und jede Frau eine Miihle, woraus allein sich bergriefen liesse, dass jede Vermdhlung eine Vermelung.... [43]
Chaucer has utilized the ambiguities of milling in relation to human actions in several places; in the Reeve's Tale it comes out vividly in the shifting contexts of millers, real and figurative, robbing each other during the grinding. The Wife of Bath, talking in her Prologue about her adulterous activities with younger men, says proverbially, "Who so that first to mille comth, first grynth." (1. 389) The possibility that the girl's references to sex may also be suggestive of body parts is strengthened by the verse in Child I, 14:
Ye maun thresh't atween your lufes, [palms]
And ye maun sack't atween your thies.
But the evidence in this category is inconclusive. In Child A, the knight leaves in haste as soon as he sees that he is about
to get more than he had bargained for, upon which the girl concludes, in what may be either disappointment or triumph,
My maidenhead I'll then keep still,
Let the elphin knight do what he will.
The Ozark version, "The Cambric Shirt," leaves off the denouement and simply ends with what appears to be the girl's taunt. From a strictly structural point of view, the American version here under discussion would be seen as lacking both the elfin knight opening and the above ending, and would thus likely be viewed by some as "deteriorated." But from a textural point of view, this version has added a new dimension; instead of carrying the story out to a stated conclusion, "The Cambric Shirt" focuses the listener's concentration on the ambiguities themselves in such a way that he hears the girl say no, but realizes that she means yes. He sees that if the young man succeeds in doing properly the tasks she outlines for him, he will have had his "Cambric Shirt" in the process.
William Empson has said that "the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry." [44] Certainly the above ballad has used the ambiguous riddle in order to gain the most striking dramatic and humorous effects through textural manipulation. While references to folklore in the ballads are not, on the whole, in the nature of true riddles, they represent enigmas to the modem scholar which are not unlike those encountered above. It is the task of the modern ballad scholar to investigate more closely the function of these traditional references in the poetic texture of the ballads so that the nature of the ballad poetry may be more competently assessed.
University of Utah
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1. See M. J. C. Hodgart's The Ballads (London, 1950), pp. 28-31.
2 From The Merry Muses of Caledonia, reprinted in Vivian de Sola Pinto and Allan Edwin Rodway, The Common Muse (New York, 1957), p. 430.
3 See R. C. A. Prior's translation of "Gitu Rima" in his Ancient Danish Ballads, 3 vols. (London 1860), I, 336-341.
4 The Idiom of the People (New York, 1958), p. 31.
5 See, for example, Harold Wentworth and S. B. Flexner, eds., Dictionary of American Slang (New York, 1960), p. 96, where the definition is given: "3. taboo. Virginity; lit., the hymen." I suspect the usage is much older, but the OED has not found reason to list it at all, much less trace its history.
6 In this sequence the ring might justifiably refer to the wedding ring, bestowed after impregnation, but it is interesting to note Eric Partridge's entry of the term in his A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, 3rd. ed. (New York, 1950): "the female pudend; cf. 'cracked in the ring'" (i.e., no longer virgin).
7. Bertrand Bronson, The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads (Princeton, 1959-), I, 378. Other variants listed by Bronson have "apple" for "cherry" (note that what the image loses in its connection with virginity its gains in the connection between apple and temptation). In Bronson's variant No. 12 there is another indication that the singer's knowledge of the underlying theme resulted in more of an obvious reference than that which usually appears: For the answer to "How can there be a baby with no cryin'?" most versions have "A baby when it's sleepin'..." but here there is no question posed, the answers are given only as outright statements, and the line in question reads, "And when the baby's a-making / There's no squalling." Bronson, Tunes, I, 380.
8 James Reeves, The Idiom of the People (New York, 1958), p. 170.
9 Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend (New York, 1950), p. 857.
10 English Riddles from Oral Tradition (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1951), p. 687.
11. W. S. Mackie, ed. and trans., The Exeter Book, Part II, EETS, No. 194 (London, 1934), pp. 114-115, 140-141; see also riddles 45, 54, 62.
12. T. J. Farr, "Riddles and Superstitions of Middle Tennessee," JAF, XLVIII (1935), 318.
13. The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore, I, 301.
14 P. 76.
15 "Riddles from Arkansas," JAF, LXIV (1954), 256.
16 It is conceivable, too, that the analogy with "needle," aided by the actions noted, would suggest "penis," in which case the feminine designation would be seen as camouflage.
17 Frederic Peachy, ed., Clareti Enigmata ("Folklore Studies," No. 10 University of California Press, 1957), pp. 39, 27.
18. Peachy, p. 22.
19 Child and Wimberly both write of this ballad as an example of riddlecraft, but primarily because of its competitive posing of impossible tasks.
20 See, for example, T. F. Thiselton-Dyer, The Folklore of Plants (New York, 1898), p. 160; Wimberly, Folklore in the English and Scottish Ballads, p. 350. Thomas Hardy uses thyme in this connection as a means of foreshadowing a death in Return of the Native; before she dies, Clym's mother lies back on a soft bank of thyme and watches a bird fly overhead.
21 See Child, I, 172-173.
22 Reeves, Idiom, pp. 203-204. Reeves' note on the line: "the wooden breeches: the coffin."
23 G. F. Northall, English Folk-Rhymes (London, 1892), p. 112; for love-divination using sage, see also Wayland D. Hand, ed., Popular Beliefs and Superstitions from North Carolina (The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore, VI, Durham, N. C. 1961), p. 261.
24 Harry E. Wedeck, Dictionary of Aphrodisiacs (New York, 1961), p. 234.
25 Paneros (New York, 1932), pp. 45-46.
26 Gosta Frisk, ed., A Middle English Translation of "Macer Floridus de Viribus Herbarum," Essays and Studies on English Language and Literature, III (Uppsala, 1949), pp. 97-98.
27 The shirt (cyrtel, hraegl) is used ambiguously in some of the erotic riddles of the Exeter Book; see riddles No. 44, 54, 61, 62, especially the latter two (numbered 62 and 63 in Tupper's edition).
28 Of the kenning, Professor Arthur G. Brodeur says, "Creation and apprehension of such a strained metaphor require an act of intellectual exercise not unlike that required by a riddle." (The Art of Beowulf, Berkeley, 1960, p. 253).
29 Pp. 600-601.
30. An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1893).
31 Partridge, in his Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, has for horn "the male member."
32 It is interesting to note that in Shakespeare's Bawdy (New York, 1960), Partridge has a parallel etymology of "yard": "penis, usually with the implication of erectus... from M. E. yarde, 0. E. gerd, 'a rod, staff,' which is cognate with L. hasta, 'a staff, a shaft; hence, a spear.' "
33 J. M. McPherson, Primitive Beliefs in North-east Scotland (London, 1929), pp. 49-50.
34 Ozark Superstitutions (New York, 1947), pp. 262-263.
35. Sir James G. Frazer, The New Golden Bough, ed. T. H. Gaster (New York, 1959), p. 262.
36. For an excellent and concise version of Frazer's discussion of death/life, modified admirably by strictures and supports drawn from modern scholarship, see Gaster's edition, ibid., pp. 223-279("The Rhythm of Nature"), and pp. 283-397 ("Dying and Reviving Gods"). Also illuminating is Joseph Campbell's chapter, "The Ritual Love-Death," in The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology (New York, 1959), pp. 170-225.
37 "The Mower," in Pinto and Rodway, p. 289.
38. Standish O'Grady, ed. and trans. (London, 1892), II, 86.
39 In other versions in the Child collection and elsewhere, the most frequent reference is to the ram's horn. In 9 out of 18 versions reproduced by Bronson, for example, the ram's horn (its ancient connection with fertility and the cornucopia can hardly have been forgotten here) is used; in five of the remainder "thy horn" (see above, p. 16) is used; in the four remaining instances, one is unclassified, and the others may also be ambiguous: horse-horn (2); ox-horn (1). In the majority of the American versions available to me at this time, the modem generations have exhibited a tendency to forget the possibilities of ambiguity and to assume that the tasks are actually to be whimsically impossible; they use "muley-cow's horn," "hog's-horn," "deer's horn."
40 Note, as well, "He plough'd her, and she cropt." A. 4& C. II, ii, 240-242. See Partridge's entries in Shakespeare's Bawdy at "crop," "tillage," "plough," "unear'd."
41 P. 128.
42 Reeves, p. 156.
43 F. Nork, Mythologie der Volkssagen und Volksmdrchen, Vol. IX, Das Kloster (Stuttgart, 1848), pp. 301-302.
44. Seven Types of Ambiguity (London, 1949), p. 3.