Can you solve 11 of the hardest riddles in history? (2023)

Test your brain with these hard riddles andpuzzle. If you're stumped, scroll to the bottom to see the answers.


Anyone who has been lost in Middle Earth knows this.J.R.R. TolkienI loved a logic puzzle. The riddle competition between Bilbo Baggins and Gollum inoh hobbitserves up several mind-blowing bits, the trickiest of which might be:

It screams without a voice, flutters without wings, bites without teeth, murmurs without a mouth.

-Gollum

2. The Mad Hatter's Dirty Trick

One of the most famous literary riddles in literature is also the most frustrating... because it went unanswered! InAlice in Wonderland, the Mad Hatter poses this puzzle to Alice:

"Why is a raven like a desk?"

-The mad Hatter

In the work of SophoclesKing Oedipus, the main character must respond to the Sphinx in order to save his own life and continue his journey to Thebes. Spoiler: he's cool.the monster asks:

What walks with four feet in the morning, two in the afternoon and three at night?

-The Sphinx

4. A Harry Potter riddle

Oharry potterThe series is full of wit and playful language, so it's only fitting that a juicy riddle found its way into the series. InThe Goblet of Fire, J.K. Rowling nods to the Sphinx putting one in the maze during the Triwizard Tournament. Harry is tasked with solving this puzzle:

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Think first of a person who lives incognito, who trades in secrets and tells nothing but lies. So tell me which one is the last to fix, the middle of the middle and the end of the end. Finally, give me the sound often heard when searching for a hard-to-find word. Now unite them and answer me, which creature do you not want to kiss?

-The Sphinx


The riddle was coined by mathematician Raymond Smullyan and goes by many names: "A Fork in the Road," "Heaven and Hell" and "The Two Doors" among them. He is probably best known for having a role in the 1986 film.Labyrinth. This is the basic idea: you can choose between two identical doors with an identical protector on each one. One door leads to heaven and one door leads to hell. You can ask a guard a question and then choose which door to go through. One of the guards always tells the truth and one of them always lies. So what question do you ask?

6. A Bully Riddle

This riddle wasrumorsto bede teddy rooseveltfavorite:

I speak but I don't say what I think I hear words but I don't hear thoughts When I wake up everyone sees me When I sleep everyone hears me Many heads are on my shoulders Many hands are at my feet The strongest steel cannot Break my face But the softest whisper can break me to destroy. The quietest moan can be heard.

Can you solve 11 of the hardest riddles in history? (1)

emUlises,Stephen Dedalus poses a riddle to his students. A word to the wise: don't waste too much time trying to figure this out.

The rooster crowed The sky was blue: The bells in the sky Tolled eleven It's time for this poor soul to go to heaven.

(Video) Even the Smartest Professor Can't Solve All 17 Riddles

-Stephen Dedalus

8. The One That Started It All

There is debate as to who wrote the first riddle, but the ancient civilization of Sumer is undoubtedly responsible for one of them. The contribution of the Sumerians to the legacy of logical problems:

There's a house. People go in blind and come out seeing. What is it?


Another oldie but goodie originated in 18th century England, though you may know it byHard to Killwith a vengeance.

As I made my way to St. Ives, I met seven wives on the way; Each wife had seven bags, each bag had seven cats, each cat had seven puppies: puppies, cats, bags and wives, how many went to St Ives?

10. Plato's ancient head scratcher

emTo Republicthe philosopher platoreferencesa famous Greek riddle credited to someone named Panarces:

There is a story that a man and not a man saw and did not see a bird and not a bird perched on a branch and not on a branch and hit him and did not hit him with a stone and not with a stone.

-Panarces
Can you solve 11 of the hardest riddles in history? (2)

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The call "Eisstein's riddle” asks a simple question: “Whose fish is it?” It may not have been written by Einstein, sometimes it isattributed to Lewis Carroll, and it is very likely that none of them wrote it. Occasionally, some versions feature other animals, such aszebras, instead of fish. But regardless of its origins, this riddle is a difficult one:

Here is the configuration:

There are 5 houses in five different colors. In each house lives a person of a different nationality. These five owners drink a certain type of beverage, smoke a certain brand of cigar, and have a certain pet. the same brand of cigarette or drink the same drink. The question is: Who owns the fish? Here are his tips: The British live in the red house The Swede has pet dogs The Dane drinks tea The green house is to the left of the white house The owner of the green house drinks coffee The smoker Pall Mall has birds The owner in the yellow house smokes Dunhill The man The man who lives in the center house drinks milk The Norwegian lives in the first house The man who smokes mixes lives next door to the man who breeds cats The man who breeds horses lives next to the man who smokes Dunhill The owner who smokes BlueMaster drinks beer The German smokes PrinceThe Norwegian lives next door to the blue houseThe man who smokes blend has a neighbor who drinks water.

Can you solve 11 of the hardest riddles in history? (3)

1. The wind

2. The Hatter doesn't have the answer, and apparently neither does Carroll. But the readers' desire for closure was so intense that the author was forced to invent a response that later appeared in a preface:

So often have questions been put to me as to whether any answer to the hatter's riddle can be devised, that I may also record here what seems to me the most appropriate answer, viz.: 'Because it can produce a few notes, though they are quite flat; and it is never placed wrong side up!' This, however, is just an afterthought; the riddle, as originally invented, had no answers at all.

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-Lewis Carroll

3. “Man: as a child he crawls on all fours; as an adult it walks on two legs and; in old age he uses a 'staff'.

4. A spider.

5. EmLabyrinth, the leading lady (Sarah, played by Jennifer Connelly) gets it right. She asks the one on the left: "Would you tell me [referring to the guard on the right] that this door leads to the castle?" Leftie tells Sarah that he is, and from there she concludes that he is the one who guards the door to "certain death". This can be tricky to figure out, but luckily the internet has an endless supply of resources if you want to dig deeper.puzzle logic.

6. An actor

7. “The fox burying his grandmother under a mistletoe.”

Take it? Dedalus's students did not, and many scholars believe that is the point. The overdone difficulty is meant to be a kind of puzzle upon puzzles. However, not allby James Joyceriddles inUlisesthey are impossible. The protagonist Leopold Bloom jokes: "A good puzzle would be to cross Dublin without going through a pub." This Equally Puzzling Head Scratcherit was solvedby a software developer in 2011. The programmer managed to map all the pubs in Dublin and used an algorithm to plot a course that never comes within 35 meters of one.

8. A school

9. One. As John McClane learns, this is a classic trick question. If the Storyteller meets the group on the way to St. Ives, they must go in the opposite direction, and the math is simply a trick to deceive.

10. “A eunuch who could not see well saw a bat perched on a reed and threw a pumice stone at it, which missed,”according to plato. You can be forgiven for not thinking about this. In Greek, the verb "to hit" can also indicate throwing something with the intention of hitting it.

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11. The German.here it isan explanation

A version of this article was originally published in 2017; has been updated for 2022.

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