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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