#but I don't remember any scandinavian folktales with that kind of riddle either... maybe my memory is failing me

[laurasimonsdaughter]

I'm musing on how most riddles in folktales really do not behave like what we consider riddles today. Because they usually fall into one of these categories:

● A cryptic question referring to something that actually happened and only the asker could know the answer to. Like in the Grimms' "The Riddle", where a prince asks a princess this: "What killed none, and yet killed twelve." The answer is a particular raven, which ingested poisoned meat and was then cooked into soup, eaten by twelve robbers who immediately died from it. (This is also called a "neck riddle" because it often shows up in stories where winning the riddle contest saves the protagonist's neck.)

● A cryptic question that has a metaphorical answer, but which could technically have many correct answers, not just one. Like the riddles posed in the ballad "Riddles Wisely Expounded", one of which is "What is louder than the horn?" with the answer "Thunder is louder than the horn."

● An apparently "impossible task" instead of a question. Like in Joseph Jacobs' "The Clever Lass" in which the king orders a clever farmer's daughter to "come to him clothed, yet unclothed, neither walking, nor driving, nor riding, neither in shadow nor in sun." So she undresses and wraps herself in her long hair, attaches a net to the tail of a hose and lets herself be dragged to the castle while holding a sieve over her head to shield her from the sun. (This type of contradiction riddle even shows up in the Mabinogi.)

Of course it matters what role the riddles play in the tale. Usually it's not about the riddle at all, it's just about the protagonist proving how clever and/or witty they are. And in case of the neck riddles, the audience usually also knows the answer, because they know what happened to the protagonist earlier in the story, so the audience gets the pleasure of being smarter than the antagonist.

In the originally Persian tale "Turandot" cryptic questions with (I would say) multiple answers are mixed with something that feels more like a riddle with one "proper answer". For example: "What mother resides on earth, who swallows all her children." The answer is: "The sea, she swallows every stream and river that has ever sprung from her." But I feel like whenever I encounter a "classic" riddle with one proper answer, that usually rhymes, it's either from Greek Mythology (boy did they love a riddling verse), or it a modern riddle added in the retelling...