Everyone knows the classic Riddle of the Sphinx: what is it that walks
on four legs in the morning, on two at noon and on three in the
evening? the answer being man, who goes on hands and knees in infancy,
with bipedal locomotion in after years, and in old age with a cane.
The posing of such riddles was an important affair with ancient
peoples. It was a tradition of the archaic Scandinavians, among whom it
shows clear literary relations. Thus, the riddle—what is the name of
the horse that flies with upright wings across the sea, the answer
being ship—becomes the metaphor, of a type common in the Sagas—the
upright-winged horse of the sea.
Old forms of writing take on puzzle forms. In the Maya hieroglyphics of
Central America is found an element similar to the mechanism of the
rebus. It is as though the symbol meaning “hair” in juxtaposition with
the one meaning “ring,” might mean “hair and ring” or it might mean
herring. This makes the decipherment of the Maya writing so very
difficult for modern scholars. The old fashioned charade has rebus-like
elements. Cryptography, of course, must have begun in the earliest
times when a literate man had a secret message to convey. The most
recondite systems of hidden writing have been devised both for
practical use and literary fantasy, remembering only Poe’s ingenious
speculations. Much of the “Baconian Theory” has revolved around
supposed cryptography in Shakespeare.
Ancient and medieval folk were much given to anagrams; that is, to
phrases of related meanings and made up of the same letters—as the
masterpiece, “They see,” answer “The eyes,” or “Honor est a Nilo,”
answer “Horatio Nelson.” Into theological controversy came such
damnations as this: The Calvinistic opponents of Jacobus Arminius
rearranged the letters of his name to spell, “vani orbis
amicus,”—“friend of the false world.”
A recent “Baconian” argument based itself on an anagrammatical
treatment of the long dedication of the sonnets. The author rearranged
the letters of the dedication to form a statement that it was Lord
Bacon who had written the verse. An experienced puzzler might object
that he could rearrange the numerous letters to spell out a statement
of almost anything, that he would rearrange the letters that make up
Aristotle’s Poetics into a treatise proving that when the Democrats are
in office hard times come. Similar to the anagram in principle is the
transposition, in which you fill blanks in a text with words that are
made up of the same letters; for instance, angered, enraged, derange.
Of ancient glory, too, is the palindrome, which is properly not a
puzzle at all, but an ingenuity. A palindrome reads the same backward
and forward, as in the familiar “Madam, I’m Adam,” and “Able was I ere
I saw Elba.” Perhaps the most charming of antique palindromes is the
Roman legal maxim, “Si nummi immunis,”—“if you pay you go free.”
But perhaps the most fascinating of all word puzzles are the types in
which words are to be guessed from definitions. There is the well-known
acrostic, where with definitions as clues you arrive at a set of words
of which the initial letters, or finals or second letters or third, as
may have been determined, will spell another or other words. During the
struggle for Italian freedom an acrostic was seen in the shibboleth,
Vittorio Emmanuele Re D’Italia, giving the name of the composer, Verdi.
Most august of all is the fish symbol for Christ, which was held in
much mystic veneration in the early Christian centuries. The Greek word
for fish, Ichthys (Ιχθυς) was seen to be composed of the first letters
of the sacred phrase, Iesous Christos Theou Huios Soter (Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς
Θεοῦ Υἱὸς Σῷτήρ), meaning “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.”
It is the feature of determining words from definitions that has made
“word forms” the most popular genus of puzzle. A word form is a set of
words arranged one under the other so that their letters may be read
across and down to give sensible readings, sometimes the same readings
across and down and sometimes different readings. They may be of many
geometric configurations, as square, pyramid, octagon, etc. Their
origin is lost in the mists of time.
Word forms, especially squares, have a considerable following of very
skillful adepts, most of them members of the National Puzzlers’ League,
who construct and solve them with the same sort of devotion that a
chess player demonstrates toward chess. Among such the forms take the
most learned guise and consist of the most unusual sort of words. With
the adepts any word that has ever been printed in an English book is
allowable, and thus there is a great selection of exotic words in
various spellings from old gazetteers, books of travel, etc. The adept
delights in words that no one has ever heard of before. Here are
several examples of recondite ingenuities.