Week 4 Essay: Wisdom Through Riddles

Wisdom was a central theme in this week's reading unit, Twenty-Two Goblins. In the story, a king was trying to accomplish the task assigned to him by a monk. The king was supposed to bring a dead body to the cemetery. But there was a goblin living in the dead body that was hanging from a tree who tried to trick the king with riddles.

(Image information: "The Goblin in a Tree" by Perham W. Nahl 1917.)

Each story was part of a greater story, and the riddles at the end of each story underscored the overall theme of wisdom. Because while the king was on a quest to complete his assigned task, he was also on a quest to discover the true motives of the monk, and he did this by impressing the goblin with the correct answers to the riddles.

In the beginning, the riddles were fairly similar. They were questions like if three lovers all contributed to bringing a dead girl to life, which one deserves her as his wife? The king would then say something like that only the man who slept by her lifeless body each night deserved to marry her because that is the role of a husband. I definitely guessed that answer before I read it. But over the course of the story, the goblin's riddles became trickier.

A more difficult riddle was about a Brahman who died because a snake's poison dripped from his mouth into the Brahman's food that was given to him by a charitable man. But the snake was dying in the claws of a hawk when it happened. So who is to blame for the Brahman's death? I thought it would be the hawk because the snake couldn't help what he did while he was dying, and the charitable man was only trying to be friendly. But the hawk was already trying to kill someone. But the king said that the Brahman himself was responsible for his death because he accused the charitable man of poisoning him. That seemed a bit severe to me. Nonetheless, the riddles made me really contemplate the characters and the themes in order to  gain wisdom about the situation.

All throughout the story, the king had the knowledge necessary to vanquish evil, but he thought that the goblin was evil and was who needed to be defeated. So even though the king could answer almost every riddle, he still gained knowledge from his quest.