Why is a raven like a writing desk?
Feb. 29th, 2004 11:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyThis essaylet emerges from a conversation between ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
radiotelescope and myself (in the comments to this post) in which I tried and failed to articulate the difference between a riddle and a question. And as I've been thinking about it, I've realized that I have rather a lot to say on the subject--although possibly no answers.
So, in honor of Leap Year, this very long post.
In pondering this issue, I am following in the footsteps of J. R. R. Tolkien--which, while not an infallible predictor of success, is at least a good omen. The riddle contest between Bilbo and Gollum in Chapter 5 of The Hobbit, "Riddles in the Dark," hinges on exactly the definitional difference between riddles and questions:
This exchange shows us at once that riddles and questions are not the same--but that they can be confused for each other. And the fact that Gollum can't answer the question, whereas he was able to answer all of Bilbo's riddles, demonstrates that the two categories, while not widely divided, cannot be approached in the same fashion if one hopes for any kind of success:
Bilbo is treating a question like a riddle, which causes the transaction of riddles to break down.
Riddles are puzzles; when they are posed, it is with an understanding on both sides that the answer can be found with knowledge common to both parties. Tolkien demonstrates that, too, by the difficulty Gollum has with An eye in a blue face and A box without hinges (Tolkien 85-87). They are perfectly fair riddles, and Gollum does have the knowledge necessary to answer them, but that knowledge is no longer common (in the sense of ordinary) to him. Likewise, Bilbo only guesses Alive without breath by a fluke--Tolkien points out slyly that "he never had anything to do with the water if he could help it" (Tolkien 87)--but he, too, has the knowledge the riddle requires, if he can only think of it.
Therefore, with riddles, there are givens: that they have an answer, and that the answer can be found by reasoning alone. These givens are what Lewis Carroll contravenes with his famous Why is a raven like a writing desk? Alice tries to play by the unspoken rules: "'I'm glad they've begun asking riddles--I believe I can guess that' she added aloud" (Carroll 95). But the Mad Hatter and the March Hare aren't interested in the rules Alice thinks she understands:
Arguably, the Mad Hatter's riddle doesn't even deserve the name, for while a number of people have come up with solutions, Carroll himself said, "the Riddle, as originally invented, had no answer at all" (qtd. Carroll 95, note 3). This sleight-of-hand is typical of the method in Carroll's madness; his creatures are always logical, but always operating on givens that poor Alice does not expect. In this case, the Hatter and the Hare are simply ignoring the contract between poser and respondent that a riddle must be answerable. Why is a raven like a writing desk? is as unanswerable as Bilbo's What have I got in my pocket?, although for very different reasons. The Hatter's offering has the markers of a riddle, but no answer; while Bilbo's question has an answer, it is not a riddle.
Tolkien was well aware that Bilbo was cheating--appropriate to a transaction involving the One Ring--although he points out that Bilbo had good reason:
Bilbo and Gollum are both cheating; Gollum's last guess ("'String, or nothing!' shrieked Gollum" (Tolkien 90--and one of my favorite lines in all of Tolkien)) is itself not fair, and Gollum does not abide by the agreement he and Bilbo made. One can argue that they both suffer for their dishonesty--Gollum by losing the Ring, Bilbo by gaining it--which suggests that the sacred nature of the riddle game is something that ought not to be trifled with.
The idea of the sacredness of riddles is where Tolkien crosses paths with Shakespeare. I wrote a paper, five years ago now, about Pericles and romance, in which I argued that, in Pericles, Shakespeare deliberately constructed the genre of romance as something antique, and that one of the ways he achieved that effect was through the use of riddles.
Pericles enters the play at a paradigmatic chivalric romantic moment; he has come to perform a task and win a princess. We meet him, in fact, as he begins his rite of passage, a moment which is heavily charged with fairytale resonances--the ostentatious evil of Antiochus resembles that of a giant or an ogre, or even the Sphinx of Thebes:
As an audience, we recognize this moment for what it is, just as Antiochus and Pericles do. It has the flavor of a ritual, which it is on two levels. On one, Antiochus has gone through this many times; it is a ritual, of a particularly macabre sort. On another, the structural level of romance, Pericles is participating in one of the proving rites of the chivalric hero; he knows his genre and his role. Northrop Frye, in remarking the importance of ritual to the beginnings of drama, says, "if archaeologists ever discover a flourishing drama in Minoan or Mayan culture, it may not have plays like King Lear or The Alchemist, but it will almost certainly have plays like Pericles" (Frye 59). Leaving entirely aside whether Frye is right or wrong in this pronouncement, he is pointing to an important and deliberate feature of Pericles. It gives itself the air, which we may be right to suspect, of being old and primitive and somewhat naïve. Ritual is very important in Pericles, as is the equally ancient custom of riddles, a fact which both contributes to the antique effect of the first part of the play and is a structural principle of the whole.
Like Oedipus, Pericles is about to come a cropper--not over the riddle itself, to which, as a good chivalric hero, he finds the answer to, but over the answer:
As with Oedipus's catastrophic riddle, the answer to Pericles's is "incest"--an answer which Pericles refuses to speak--and this answer throws the entire project of chivalric romance in the play off the rails. It corrupts the somewhat vague but necessary category of "eligible maiden," and therefore the hero's quest to secure for himself a member of that category becomes impossible, and perhaps corrupted itself. Pericles is prevented from fulfilling the conventions of his genre; this scene, which Pericles constructs as the central scene of chivalric romance, has broken down.
Pericles solves Antiochus's riddle in the first scene; the problem is that he can't answer it, both because Antiochus will kill him and because, in some profound way, the play does not want that answer to the riddle to be the right one. One way to read the events of the play is as a great circle away from Antiochus's Daughter and toward Marina, whom Pericles describes as "Thou that begett'st him that did thee beget" (Per. 21.182). This is a singularly torturous formulation, but one that does indeed seem to offer an answer to Antiochus's "He's father, son, and husband mild; / I mother, wife, and yet his child." The first scene is replicated in order to be exorcised; as C. L. Barber says, "in Pericles, we begin with overt incest and arrive at a sublime transformation of the motive" (Barber 64). Pericles is both father and son; Marina is both mother and child. The fact that they do not complete the triad in their own bodies, that they do not become "husband" and "wife" to each other, I would argue, leads directly to Pericles’s reward, the clues Diana gives him about how to find his own wife. In point of fact, by the end of the play, Pericles will (still) be a husband, and Marina will be on the track to becoming a wife (Per. 22.9-11). The generics of riddles demand answers; Pericles, by the laws of this genre, has to answer the riddle before it can end, and the play is the record of a search for a viable and survivable answer.
Riddles are rituals. Questions are not. I think that's the formulation I've been trying to get to. Questions have no constraints; they can be answered, unanswered, unanswerable, intended not to be answered ... Riddles are predictable, asked and answered--thus the confusion we, with Gollum and Alice, are thrown into when we are asked something which pretends to be a riddle and yet which cannot be answered. It isn't so much that there is a "right" answer to a riddle--there are "right" answers to many questions as well--as that in riddling, question and answer are like lock and key, mutually interdependent and useless without each other.
And thus the satisfaction of answering a riddle is the satisfaction of having a key turn in a lock, hearing the click, and knowing that the door will open for you.
WORKS CITED
---
Barber, C. L. "'Thou That Beget'st Him That Did Thee Beget': Transformation in 'Pericles' and 'The Winter’s Tale.'” Shakespeare Survey 22 (1969): 59-67.
Carroll, Lewis. Alice in Wonderland. Illus. John Tenniel. The Annotated Alice. Introd., Notes Martin Gardner. 1960. New York: Wings Books-Random House, 1998.
Frye, Northrop. A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1965.
Shakespeare, William. Pericles, Prince of Tyre. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997. 2719-76.
Tolkien, J. R. R. The Hobbit. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1966.
radiotelescope and myself (in the comments to this post) in which I tried and failed to articulate the difference between a riddle and a question. And as I've been thinking about it, I've realized that I have rather a lot to say on the subject--although possibly no answers.So, in honor of Leap Year, this very long post.
In pondering this issue, I am following in the footsteps of J. R. R. Tolkien--which, while not an infallible predictor of success, is at least a good omen. The riddle contest between Bilbo and Gollum in Chapter 5 of The Hobbit, "Riddles in the Dark," hinges on exactly the definitional difference between riddles and questions:
"What have I got in my pocket?" he said aloud. He was talking to himself, but Gollum thought it was a riddle, and he was frightfully upset.
"Not fair! Not fair!" he hissed. "It isn't fair, my precious, is it, to ask us what it's got in its nassty little pocketses?"
(Tolkien 89)
This exchange shows us at once that riddles and questions are not the same--but that they can be confused for each other. And the fact that Gollum can't answer the question, whereas he was able to answer all of Bilbo's riddles, demonstrates that the two categories, while not widely divided, cannot be approached in the same fashion if one hopes for any kind of success:
"Answers were to be guessed not given," he said.
"But it wasn't a fair question," said Gollum. "Not a riddle, precious, no."
"Oh well, if it's a matter of ordinary questions," Bilbo replied, "then I asked one first."
(Tolkien 93)
Bilbo is treating a question like a riddle, which causes the transaction of riddles to break down.
Riddles are puzzles; when they are posed, it is with an understanding on both sides that the answer can be found with knowledge common to both parties. Tolkien demonstrates that, too, by the difficulty Gollum has with An eye in a blue face and A box without hinges (Tolkien 85-87). They are perfectly fair riddles, and Gollum does have the knowledge necessary to answer them, but that knowledge is no longer common (in the sense of ordinary) to him. Likewise, Bilbo only guesses Alive without breath by a fluke--Tolkien points out slyly that "he never had anything to do with the water if he could help it" (Tolkien 87)--but he, too, has the knowledge the riddle requires, if he can only think of it.
Therefore, with riddles, there are givens: that they have an answer, and that the answer can be found by reasoning alone. These givens are what Lewis Carroll contravenes with his famous Why is a raven like a writing desk? Alice tries to play by the unspoken rules: "'I'm glad they've begun asking riddles--I believe I can guess that' she added aloud" (Carroll 95). But the Mad Hatter and the March Hare aren't interested in the rules Alice thinks she understands:
"Have you guessed the riddle yet?" the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.
"No, I give it up," Alice replied. "What's the answer?"
"I haven't the slightest idea," said the Hatter.
"Nor I," said the March Hare.
Alice sighed wearily. "I think you might do something better with the time," she said, "then wasting it in askinkg riddles that have no answers."
(Carroll 97)
Arguably, the Mad Hatter's riddle doesn't even deserve the name, for while a number of people have come up with solutions, Carroll himself said, "the Riddle, as originally invented, had no answer at all" (qtd. Carroll 95, note 3). This sleight-of-hand is typical of the method in Carroll's madness; his creatures are always logical, but always operating on givens that poor Alice does not expect. In this case, the Hatter and the Hare are simply ignoring the contract between poser and respondent that a riddle must be answerable. Why is a raven like a writing desk? is as unanswerable as Bilbo's What have I got in my pocket?, although for very different reasons. The Hatter's offering has the markers of a riddle, but no answer; while Bilbo's question has an answer, it is not a riddle.
Tolkien was well aware that Bilbo was cheating--appropriate to a transaction involving the One Ring--although he points out that Bilbo had good reason:
He knew, of course, that the riddle-game was sacred and of immense antiquity, and even wicked creatures were afraid to cheat when they played at it. But he felt he could not trust this slimy thing to keep any promise at a pinch. Any excuse would do for him to slide out of it. And after all that last question had not been a genuine riddle according to the ancient laws.
(Tolkien 90)
Bilbo and Gollum are both cheating; Gollum's last guess ("'String, or nothing!' shrieked Gollum" (Tolkien 90--and one of my favorite lines in all of Tolkien)) is itself not fair, and Gollum does not abide by the agreement he and Bilbo made. One can argue that they both suffer for their dishonesty--Gollum by losing the Ring, Bilbo by gaining it--which suggests that the sacred nature of the riddle game is something that ought not to be trifled with.
The idea of the sacredness of riddles is where Tolkien crosses paths with Shakespeare. I wrote a paper, five years ago now, about Pericles and romance, in which I argued that, in Pericles, Shakespeare deliberately constructed the genre of romance as something antique, and that one of the ways he achieved that effect was through the use of riddles.
Pericles enters the play at a paradigmatic chivalric romantic moment; he has come to perform a task and win a princess. We meet him, in fact, as he begins his rite of passage, a moment which is heavily charged with fairytale resonances--the ostentatious evil of Antiochus resembles that of a giant or an ogre, or even the Sphinx of Thebes:
whoso asked her for his wife,
His riddle told not, lost his life.
So for her many a wight did die,
As yon grim looks do testify.
(Per. 1.37-40)
As an audience, we recognize this moment for what it is, just as Antiochus and Pericles do. It has the flavor of a ritual, which it is on two levels. On one, Antiochus has gone through this many times; it is a ritual, of a particularly macabre sort. On another, the structural level of romance, Pericles is participating in one of the proving rites of the chivalric hero; he knows his genre and his role. Northrop Frye, in remarking the importance of ritual to the beginnings of drama, says, "if archaeologists ever discover a flourishing drama in Minoan or Mayan culture, it may not have plays like King Lear or The Alchemist, but it will almost certainly have plays like Pericles" (Frye 59). Leaving entirely aside whether Frye is right or wrong in this pronouncement, he is pointing to an important and deliberate feature of Pericles. It gives itself the air, which we may be right to suspect, of being old and primitive and somewhat naïve. Ritual is very important in Pericles, as is the equally ancient custom of riddles, a fact which both contributes to the antique effect of the first part of the play and is a structural principle of the whole.
Like Oedipus, Pericles is about to come a cropper--not over the riddle itself, to which, as a good chivalric hero, he finds the answer to, but over the answer:
I am no viper, yet I feed
On mother's flesh which did me breed.
I sought a husband, in which labour
I found that kindness in a father.
He's father, son, and husband mild;
I mother, wife, and yet his child.
How this may be and yet in two,
As you will live resolve it you.
(Per.1.108-144)
As with Oedipus's catastrophic riddle, the answer to Pericles's is "incest"--an answer which Pericles refuses to speak--and this answer throws the entire project of chivalric romance in the play off the rails. It corrupts the somewhat vague but necessary category of "eligible maiden," and therefore the hero's quest to secure for himself a member of that category becomes impossible, and perhaps corrupted itself. Pericles is prevented from fulfilling the conventions of his genre; this scene, which Pericles constructs as the central scene of chivalric romance, has broken down.
Pericles solves Antiochus's riddle in the first scene; the problem is that he can't answer it, both because Antiochus will kill him and because, in some profound way, the play does not want that answer to the riddle to be the right one. One way to read the events of the play is as a great circle away from Antiochus's Daughter and toward Marina, whom Pericles describes as "Thou that begett'st him that did thee beget" (Per. 21.182). This is a singularly torturous formulation, but one that does indeed seem to offer an answer to Antiochus's "He's father, son, and husband mild; / I mother, wife, and yet his child." The first scene is replicated in order to be exorcised; as C. L. Barber says, "in Pericles, we begin with overt incest and arrive at a sublime transformation of the motive" (Barber 64). Pericles is both father and son; Marina is both mother and child. The fact that they do not complete the triad in their own bodies, that they do not become "husband" and "wife" to each other, I would argue, leads directly to Pericles’s reward, the clues Diana gives him about how to find his own wife. In point of fact, by the end of the play, Pericles will (still) be a husband, and Marina will be on the track to becoming a wife (Per. 22.9-11). The generics of riddles demand answers; Pericles, by the laws of this genre, has to answer the riddle before it can end, and the play is the record of a search for a viable and survivable answer.
Riddles are rituals. Questions are not. I think that's the formulation I've been trying to get to. Questions have no constraints; they can be answered, unanswered, unanswerable, intended not to be answered ... Riddles are predictable, asked and answered--thus the confusion we, with Gollum and Alice, are thrown into when we are asked something which pretends to be a riddle and yet which cannot be answered. It isn't so much that there is a "right" answer to a riddle--there are "right" answers to many questions as well--as that in riddling, question and answer are like lock and key, mutually interdependent and useless without each other.
And thus the satisfaction of answering a riddle is the satisfaction of having a key turn in a lock, hearing the click, and knowing that the door will open for you.
WORKS CITED
---
Barber, C. L. "'Thou That Beget'st Him That Did Thee Beget': Transformation in 'Pericles' and 'The Winter’s Tale.'” Shakespeare Survey 22 (1969): 59-67.
Carroll, Lewis. Alice in Wonderland. Illus. John Tenniel. The Annotated Alice. Introd., Notes Martin Gardner. 1960. New York: Wings Books-Random House, 1998.
Frye, Northrop. A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1965.
Shakespeare, William. Pericles, Prince of Tyre. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997. 2719-76.
Tolkien, J. R. R. The Hobbit. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1966.
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no subject
Date: 2004-02-29 09:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-29 10:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-29 06:54 pm (UTC)I love the idea of the ritual aspect. I'd have just said that riddles must be answerable based on common knowledge, but your answer is much better.
no subject
Date: 2004-02-29 10:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-29 10:21 am (UTC)I would, but I can't remember enough about The Riddle-Master of Hed to do so.
Anyone else want to step up to the plate?
no subject
Date: 2004-02-29 11:04 am (UTC)I was a little confused by what "about to come a cropper" means, unless it's a reference to the text.
no subject
Date: 2004-02-29 11:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-29 11:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-29 12:34 pm (UTC)I used "in alt" to a friend once, and she pinpointed me instantly as a Heyer fan. Which wasn't a hard guess, but still.
no subject
Date: 2004-03-01 09:18 pm (UTC)(Parenthetically, someday I will figure out how to use handsomely over the bricks! in conversation.)
And I know it's not Sayers because I knew and was using that phrase long before I started reading DLS.
Wodehouse maybe?
Actually, I think I might bet money that it's Wodehouse.
no subject
Date: 2004-02-29 12:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-29 05:04 pm (UTC)I remember how puzzled I was when I hit Patricia MacKillip's riddles. Riddle, answer, stricture; and how I always wondered if they had all once been of the form the new riddles Morgon posed were. That is, most of them are of this form: "Who was X and what did he do when Y?" But Morgon's riddles are like this -- "Who is X, and what will he do that is Y?" or "What will one X do with A, one X with B, and one X with C?" History, prophecy, and moral precept all blend into one another.
Pamela
no subject
Date: 2004-02-29 07:32 pm (UTC)Now I have to think about the connection between the puzzles in text
games (which have that CLICK as their living soul) and the ritual
nature of riddles.
I too was puzzled by the riddles in McKillip. Well, in fact I was
outraged: (I was about ten, and fully versed in _The Hobbit_) "These
aren't *riddles*!" I didn't get over it until college.
And I really do have to read Nick Montfort's book. As soon as I finish
re-reading _The Whim of the Dragon_ (hi Pamela), in which (as I am
reading), the man in red has just knocked Ted and Laura speechless
with three vicious riddles in a row...
no subject
Date: 2004-02-29 08:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-01 11:57 am (UTC)Celtic ones appear to be much more like a mnemonic, a way of remembering a set of things. We have quite a bit of Old Welsh poetry which resembles nothing so much as riddles without answers, not questions, riddles, which we know people memorized and could be catechised on. I once spent a long time looking at this material, and what Caesar says about the druids and how they learn, and thinking about druids, and came up with the theory that maybe they are like koans. If you see riddle as koan, as a place to start unwinding to come to a place that is an answer, and also as part of a system of memorization, then you get riddles that are like the ones in Rumpelstiltskin and "The Little Tailor" and I think that may be where McKillip was coming from.
no subject
Date: 2004-03-01 07:09 pm (UTC)I'm going by what's been posted here.)
Saxon riddles are personal (in game terms, "interactive"). Someone
asks *you* the riddle.
(Someone can tell you a story about a riddle game; plenty of examples
of that in fairy tales before Tolkien did it; but it's a good story
device *because* you can guess the answer before the story-character
answers it. Those of you who have read that chapter out loud: surely
you paused, to give the audience a chance, before Bilbo or Gollum
spilled it...)
Mnemonic/catechismic riddles are also personal. The value is when you
learn them. Hearing about someone else learning them is like hearing
about someone else's lessons.
The Greek riddle, as this thread has described it, *can't* be
personal. It's an element of a story by definition. It has to be asked
on stage, to a story character, with the audience looking on; because
the riddle's meaning is in the context of the character and his story.
Jumping up to Truepenny's original thesis: I'm going with a simpler
distinction. I ask a question for my sake. I ask a riddle for your
sake. You get the thought-exercise; you get the answer (whether you
figure it out or give up). You get a new riddle to pass along. My role
is of a teacher. And note that the *least interesting* outcome of a
riddle is "Oh, I know that one already."
no subject
Date: 2004-03-01 09:23 pm (UTC)The only two Greek riddles I know of (not counting the Gordian knot, if that qualifies as a riddle) are the two Oedipus was presented with. The second one (the text of which I don't remember--is it even properly a riddle?) is definitely all about context--since the answer is Oedipus himself, but the riddle of the Sphinx of Thebes doesn't fit your hypothesis: What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening? is very much a Saxon-y sort of riddle. It would fit perfectly in Bilbo and Gollum's riddle game, although I'm sure both of them would consider it too dreadfully easy a chestnut to be asked.
Or am I missing the point of what you were trying to get at?
no subject
Date: 2004-03-02 07:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-02 08:41 pm (UTC)Delphic riddles carry double freight. They are puzzles--the Pythia was noted for the obscurity of her pronouncements--but they're puzzles with two answers: the intellectual answer and the emotional answer. To use Pericles as an example (because I've quoted the riddle), Pericles has come to win Antiochus's daughter in marriage by solving the riddle. (It's the usual fairy tale thing: the king has posed the riddle. Anyone may answer, and the man who solves the riddle gets to marry the princess, but guessing wrong leads to summary execution.) So the intellectual answer to the riddle, Antiochus's incestuous relationship with his daughter, is like a key that itself fits into another lock, the lock being the riddle of why Antiochus has this particular contest set up for his daughter's suitors, and about the relationship Pericles now finds himself in with the two of them, which is not at all the relationship he had imagined.
Delphic riddles are never games.
no subject
Date: 2004-03-01 09:25 pm (UTC)But perhaps this is just a sign that my brain is worn out and I need to take it to bed now.
no subject
Date: 2004-03-02 07:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-02 07:47 am (UTC)Yes, of course.
Consulting the oracle never helps.
no subject
Date: 2004-03-05 01:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-05 03:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-02 06:37 am (UTC)El verdor de la rama
escome la raíz.
Con carne de mi madre
engordo mi cerviz.
The greenness of the branch
is eaten away by the root.
With my mother's flesh
I fatten my womb.
The hero, who is renowned for his intelligence, immediately realises what's going on, and that the riddle cannot be solved - everybody knows about the incest, and everybody colludes, not daring to speak the truth, including the suitors. And so the king keeps his daughter (who is previously shown agreeing to the incest) while keeping up the charade of being a good father who is trying to marry her to a deserving man.
However, when pressed to solve the riddle, the hero - who is rather vain - cannot bring himself to pass as less intelligent than he is. So, despite being also very afraid of the consequences, he hints rather obviously at the answer, infuriating the king, who expected him to play along like the rest of suitors, and getting himself into a lot of trouble. (I liked this a lot - that the hero is atypical in being both vain and afraid, and that his vanity overrides even his well-developed sense of self-protection).
There is a rather old English translation of the book: The book of Apollonius, translated into English verse by Raymond L. Grismer and Elizabeth Atkins. Minneapolis, The University of Minnesota press, 1936.
no subject
Date: 2004-03-02 08:37 am (UTC)One of Shakespeare's major sources for Pericles was John Gower's Confessio Amantis(?1390), which includes the story of Apollonius of Tyre (for reasons best known to himself, Shakespeare changed his hero's name) "which, via medieval intermediaries dating all the way back to a fifth- or sixth-century Latin text, derives from a now-lost late classical Latin or, more probably, Greek romance influenced by The Odyssey" (Walter Cohen's Introduction to Pericles in The Norton Shakespeare). Somewhere in the manuscript tradition, the story must have made its way to Spain.
And although Pericles doesn't answer Antiochus's riddle, he doesn't answer it in a fashion that makes it perfectly clear to everyone that he's solved it and he's only not answering it because he knows Antiochus will kill him. Pericles isn't vain, but he's also not very bright.