Riddle me this: Harry Potter and literatures most fiendish head-scratchers | JK Rowling ·

Riddle me this: Harry Potter and literatures most fiendish head-scratchers | JK Rowling

A clever Twitter user has solved JK Rowlings anagram and Rowling says she wont be setting another. So pit your wits instead against this selection of the finest literary riddles, from Tolkien to Borges

Books blogJK Rowling

Riddle me this: Harry Potter and literature’s most fiendish head-scratchers

A clever Twitter user has solved JK Rowling’s anagram – and Rowling says she won’t be setting another. So pit your wits instead against this selection of the finest literary riddles, from Tolkien to Borges

Call off the anagramists: JK Rowling has announced that one Emily Strong, tweeting as @emybemy2, has solved her Twitter anagram: “Cry, foe! Run amok! Fa awry! My wand won’t tolerate this nonsense.” No, it wasn’t “Newt Scamander only went to New York to find a Pulkmahjkk”, or “I brung bick Harry. U gladd. Me go wurcke now. No speak.” Nor was it meant to warn us that Rowling’s “fur work canoe may fray”. Using “old-fashioned pen and paper”, @emybemy2’s “nerdiness paid off eventually” and she came up with the right answer: “Newt Scamander only meant to stay in New York for a few hours.”

“You are hereby christened The One True Hermione of Twitter. I am deeply impressed, that really wasn’t easy!” tweeted Rowling to her winner, adding to her millions of followers: “Thank you, thank you, for being the kind of people who get excited about an anagram #myspiritualhome.”

Rowling has said that she has to work now - “I’ve got a novel to finish and a screenplay to tweak” - and a second riddle won’t be forthcoming. So for all of you out there with time on your hands and no codes to crack, here are a selection of our favourite riddles from literature. Get pondering...

1. “Voiceless it cries,/ Wingless flutters,/ Toothless bites,/ Mouthless mutters.” – Gollum to Bilbo in JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit.

2. “The cock crew,/ The sky was blue:/ The bells in heaven/ Were striking eleven./ ‘Tis time for this poor soul/ To go to heaven.” – Stephen Dedalus to his pupils in James Joyce’s Ulysses.

3. “I have heard of a something-or-other, growing in its nook, swelling and rising, pushing up its covering. Upon that boneless thing a cocky-minded young woman took a grip with her hands; with her apron a lord’s daughter covered the tumescent thing.” – the Exeter Book, a collection of Anglo-Saxon riddles.

4. “If you break me, I’ll not stop working. If you can touch me, my work is done. If you lose me, you must find me with a ring soon after. What am I?” – Blaine the insane Mono train, in Stephen King’s Wizard and Glass.

5. “In a riddle whose answer is chess, what is the only prohibited word?” – asked by Stephen Albert in Jorge Luis Borges’ short story The Garden of Forking Paths.

6. “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?’” – the Mad Hatter to Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

7. “First think of the person who lives in disguise,/ Who deals in secrets and tells naught but lies./ Next, tell me what’s always the last thing to mend,/ The middle of middle and end of the end?/ And finally give me the sound often heard/ During the search for a hard-to-find word./ Now string them together, and answer me this,/ Which creature would you be unwilling to kiss?” - the sphinx to Harry Potter in JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

Click here for the answers

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