i just mean - i seem to want to take everyone into account and somehow that doesn't work, does it? scylla and charybdis, and trying to steer between the two. the overly simplistic of frye and walsh and all those who talk about riddles as - primitive lit form and building blocks of literature - because as inclined as i am towards that kind of readings they are - too narrow - narrow is the wrong word - in some senses, they're the broadest way of looking at it and at lit, but - they are too - spurious - insufficient - too carried by their own smartness/smugness, and to have only considered one kind - the strictly metaphoric riddles - is flawed. and to avoid that i must also beware the folklorists' over-contextualised, anthropological readings, because if there's anything i hate it's to read literature as socially explainable products - that's why i don't write essays with politics or gender or class in the title! that's why i decided not to be a bloody post-colonialist otherwise it'd be about society and not words. and even more wearisome is the semantician's grammatic unpacking of riddles - useful in clarifying, in classifying, but too technical and ultimately - not what would help you - read. one useful thing i got from frye is that, riddles are cognate with read. the power of reading, and of interpretation, must be important, in any of these cases, in any sense of "reading". and all literature must be interpreted. that, seems like the key, but to what?