It’s no secret that man has long been drawn to riddles, puzzles that we have to work out through logic and reasoning. The satisfaction one gains at completing one of these mindbenders is addictive, and keeps us hungering for more.

Riddles are a mainstay of fiction, and they’re especially common among fantasy stories. Often the catch that makes them so irresistible is when the answer proves to be so simple it’s just overlooked, as in the famous riddle in The Lord of the Rings, when the fellowship approaches a door that’s inscribed in Elvish, “Speak friend and enter.” Spells and passwords are thrown at the door until finally the answer is stumbled upon: they simply must say the word “friend” in the same language. “Speak friend and enter.”

Tolkien’s love of riddles is prevalent in his earlier novel, The Hobbit, as well, in the iconic chapter in which we first meet the villainous Gollum. Bilbo and Gollum get themselves into a game of riddles, each trying to top the other. The game is ended with Bilbo’s cop-out riddle, “What have I got in my pocket?” which as we all know, is not a riddle, but a mere question. And the answer, of course, is fantasy’s most famous bling, the One Ring.

Tolkien took much of his influence from the mythologies of the ancient world, so it’s no surprise that riddles can be found as far back as Greek mythology, and possibly even further.

One of the first riddles I ever remember hearing as a child was the famous riddle told by the Sphinx, a fierce monster from a distant land who came to Greece. She was sent by one god or another to guard the entrance to the city of Thebes, and ask anyone who passed her way the riddle. If they couldn’t guess an answer, she devoured them.

The Thebans lived in terror of the beast until the young Oedipus came along. She asked him the now iconic riddle, “What has four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three in the evening?” The answer, of course, is man, who crawls in infancy, walks about in his prime, and leans on a crutch in his twilight years. And thus Oedipus became famous for killing the Sphinx…and, later on, for having a notoriously peculiar taste in women.

Riddles are also a fun way to bring an audience further into the story, even making us feel like we’re a part of the action. After all, how fun is it to be struggling for an answer to a puzzle in real time along with the characters in the story? In fact, hasn’t Dan Brown made a living doing just that?

Who can forget the scene in The Labyrinth when Sarah confronts the obstacle of the two doors? Each door hosts two guards, who in true Jim Henson-style oddness, are stacked on each other in what can only be described as a chaste version of a numerical sexual position. They explain to Sarah that one of the doors will take her farther along her journey, and one leads to (bum bum bum bum) certain death. She can ask them questions, but they caution her that one of them always tells the truth, and one of them always lies.

A pickle, indeed.

But Sarah, clever vixen that she is, logics her way past this. Of course, twenty years later, I’m still trying to figure out if she got it right or not.

Mankind will never tire of riddles, and for storytelling they’re ideal, for they’re a way to turn a story into an interactive game. I’ll never forget being a child and my father telling me a riddle he had heard:

A young boy and his father are driving in a car when their car is hit by a truck. The father, tragically, doesn’t survive, but the son does, and is taken to the hospital immediately. He is brought in and put on the operating table, but the surgeon on duty, distraught, leaves the room, saying, “I’m sorry, I cannot operate on this boy. He’s my son.” Who is the surgeon?

I thought about this for a long time, as did the adults in the room, trying to figure out where the paternity could have been misconstrued, or if “son” could have been a figurative term.

As always, the simplest answer is usually correct.

The surgeon was his mother.