Some Gaelic riddles from the West Highlands

[wolfinthewood]

Collected from ‘Flora McIntyre, and a little girl, Catherine MacArthur, at Ballygrant, twelve years of age’:

I see to me, I see from me,
Two miles and ten over the sea,
The man of the green boatie,
And his shirt sewn with a thread of red.

The rainbow

A bent crooked stick between two glens,
When moves the crooked bent stick
Then move the two glens.

Scales and balance

Two strings as long as each other.

A river's banks

No bigger it is than a barleycorn,
And it will cover the board of the king.

The pupil of the eye

It came out of flesh, and has no flesh within,
It tells a story without ever a tongue.

A quill pen

Twelve brethren in one bed,
And no one of them at the front or the wall.

Spokes of the spinning-wheel

It is higher than the king’s house,
It is finer than silk.

Smoke

A waveless well, it holds its fill of flesh and blood.

A tailor’s thimble

Blacky, blacky, out at the door and a human bone in her mouth.

A shoe on a foot


from Popular Tales of the West Highlands (1860)

collected by John Francis Campbell (1860–1885)


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