The female reproductive system has, from very early on, been cast as the riddle of all riddles, as an entity calling for confounding and astounding descriptions that only the riddle is uniquely constructed to convey. To bear and to be born, these strike one as originary elemental riddles somehow in defiance of Aristotle's dictum that nothing can come from nothing. One of the earliest and possibly best-known recorded riddles about the mysterious uterus appeared for centuries in a Latin primer: ‘My mother bore me, and soon was born of me’. The solution presented is water and ice, which in a sense ‘give birth’ to one another by moving through the processes of freezing and melting. Perhaps equally old is the one about clouds, presented riddlingly as that which ‘becomes pregnant without conceiving’. While these ancient riddles figure procreation in elemental terms, anthropologists have also long considered the cultural bases and implications of such procreation riddles, observing just how the social rituals of riddling work, for instance, to entrench incest taboos. And from yet another perspective, just why procreation should be repeatedly encoded in the form of the riddle might be explained by human psychology, for as Freud observed, the central riddle of childhood is ‘where do babies come from?’

It is a mistake to think transhistorically of the riddle, to think of it as a durable rhetorical or linguistic form akin to anagrams and palindromes and serving mainly as a distraction or light entertainment.