From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

THE HARD QUESTIONS the Queen of Sheba put to Solomon in the Bible are not given, but in the subsequent literature, they are consistently assumed to be riddles. Biblical commentators’ cross-references direct the reader to other passages, where male heroes and prophets like Solomon distinguish themselves by setting or answering puzzles: to Samson who put the riddle of the lion’s carcass that brought forth sweetness (Jg. 14: 12–18), to Daniel who interpreted the dreams and visions of Nebuchadnezzar (Dan. 1: 20).

  The Book of Kings then goes on to say that the Queen of Sheba ‘communed with him of all that was in her heart’, and that Solomon reciprocated, sharing all his knowledge with her: ‘And Solomon told her all her questions: there was not any thing hid from the king, which he told her not.’ Solomon, the wisest man on earth, trusts Sheba with all he knows and understands. No wonder she becomes ‘breathless’ when she hears him, and exclaims that reports of his wisdom have fallen short of the true dimensions of his brilliance and his munificence (1 Kgs. 10: 1–13).

  But before she takes her leave of him, there is a further exchange: King Solomon gave the queen ‘all her desire, whatsoever she asked …’ The passage continues, ‘beside that which Solomon gave her of his royal bounty’. So his gifts included something more than material goods, and she is represented expressing desire: her body moves, her flesh breathes in a way that Solomon’s does not. Though they are matched in wisdom (and in wealth, almost), and now share belief in the same God, their styles of articulating their meanings differ.

  The distinction drawn between his ‘bounty’ and the fulfilment of other desires she may have expressed led hearers and readers of the Bible since the sixth century to imagine the passionate and fertile love of the king and queen. Medieval painters chose the subject, the meeting of Solomon and Sheba, for the decoration of sumptuous and festive cassoni or trousseau chests, clearly seeing their encounter as a form of bridal procession, with Sheba like a bride who comes to her groom’s bed bringing with her a rich dowry (here). The Ethiopians, as we saw, believed a child was born from their love. As a consequence of this suggestive enigmatic description in the Bible, Sheba’s special province of expertise becomes sexuality, its distinctions, its rules; in a popular and important strand of her tradition, beyond the material in the Sibylline apocalyptic books, her hard questions, presented in the form of riddles, elucidated, slyly but clearly, tabooed or secret areas of knowledge.

  When she is represented, as she so often is, pointing her index finger in the gesture of discrimination and instruction, she is seen to speak of sexual difference and correct moral judgements, as in a tapestry from Alsace of around 1475–1500, into which is woven one of the puzzles she puts to Solomon: how to tell the difference between boys and girls. Solomon scatters sweets on the ground and then points out that the boys scoop them up by the handful while the girls go down on their knees to gather them into their skirts one by one (right). ‘There,’ says Solomon in satisfaction. ‘Kneeling shows the female sex.’1

  The encounter between Solomon and Sheba was thus recounted as a battle of the sexes as well as a battle of wits, and the challengers faced each other not only to determine the truth and errors of their gods, but the respective mettle of their minds. Middle Eastern beliefs about Solomon’s wizardry travelled and grew, magical grimoires were frequently ascribed to his authorship from, the thirteenth century onwards.2 By virtue of her contact with Solomon, Sheba could be accounted wise. However, just as kneeling showed the female sex, she is still rather less wise than the wise king, a messenger of his knowledge rather than an originator.

  The Queen of Sheba asks Solomon to tell the difference between girls and boys: he nonchalantly tosses balls among them and the boys catch them while the girls kneel to pick them up. ‘Kneeling shows the female sex’, declares this kingly paragon of wisdom in a tapestry from Alsace or Strasbourg, ‘The Riddles of the Queen of Sheba’ (c. 1475).

  Alongside Christian legends of the cross, various materials imagined what the Queen of Sheba said and what she did in the course of her duel with Solomon. These texts illuminate again how in popular narratives, their shuttles flashing back and forth between oral warp and literary woof, the character of the teller encloses the tenor of the tale; how the teller enters and takes part in the story, becomes a protagonist; how Mother Goose herself exemplifies the type of the story she tells. The Cumaean Sibyl who knows hidden mysteries and can reveal them to mortals like Aeneas becomes confused with the dramatis personae of the stories about valiant knights who stray from the true path; she becomes the subject of a prophetic and cautionary narrative, she who used to be their inventor or narrator. Her journey gives us an insight into the relationship of the Sibylline queen with the evolution of the image of fairy storyteller.

  For public repudiation turns to acceptance, and the excluded, derided figure of the pagan queen who attracts anti-semitic, anti-pagan, anti-Islam propaganda gains admittance to the fold, as in Piero’s frescoes. And in consequence her heterodoxy, her difference, her whiff of marginal, secret wisdom returns, unrepressed, its poison drawn, its dangers passed, its owner tamed. Or so it is presented by the tale that she is reputed to tell – eventually.

  The queen clearly knows beforehand some of the solutions to the riddles she asks and is merely trying Solomon’s wit. For instance, on a related topic of forbidden sex, she asks: A woman said to her son, thy father is my father, and thy grandfather my husband; thou art my son, and I am thy sister.’ Solomon answers, quick as a flash: Assuredly, it was the daughter of Lot who spake so to her son.’ Both the daughters of Lot slept with their father after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, when she and her sister feared there were no more people left on earth (see Chapter Nineteen).

  Such family riddles are very old, and the history of their distribution remains hazy. They are examples of conundrums still enjoyed today, as in the rhyme, ‘Brothers and sisters have I none,/ But this man’s father is my father’s son.’ (Answer: My son.) An eighth-century Syrian bishop and riddle-master included Lot’s daughter’s question in a collection of forty-two similar posers, and it reached England, making an appearance in the Exeter Book of riddles, a manuscript of around 1000.3, 4 In a Midrash commentary on the Bible and the Book of Esther, composed in the fifteenth century by Yachya Ben Suleiman, several of the questions focus on questions of gender, on permitted erotic relations, and the mysteries of life. The transgression against the incest taboo preoccupies the Rabbi, for here too in her riddles the queen focusses on the marriage of Tamar to one of her own sons and the union of Lot and his daughters. She asks: ‘Who are the three who went into a cave and came out five?’ Again the answer comes: ‘They are Lot, his two daughters and their two sons.’

  The queen’s puzzles also introduce the themes of pregnancy, childbirth, menstruation, and suckling: ‘There is an enclosure with ten doors, when one is open, nine are shut; when nine are open, one is shut.’ The answer to this is: ‘The womb: the ten doors are the ten orifices of man [sic] – his eyes, ears, nostrils, mouth, the apertures for the discharge of the excreta and the urine, and the navel; when the child is in the embryonic state, the navel is open and the other orifices are closed, but when it issues [from the womb] the navel is closed and the others are opened.’5 In other collections, Sheba shows a lighter side; some of her riddles concern eye make-up and fast horses and other pleasures.6 But on the whole, her wisdom, in conjunction with Solomon’s, concentrates on those mysteries of sex and the body – the suspect, alarming and magical territory commanded by midwives and matchmakers.

  Examples of the queen’s riddling can be found in rabbinical folklore, in secular theatre, in Christian poetry, in painting, as well as storytelling.7 The distinction between boys and girls even featured in a pioneering theme park in the Doolhof or Old Labyrinth in Amsterdam, opened during the first half of the seventeenth century. Automata of Solomon and Sheba surrounded by children performed the riddle in one of its versions. The contemporary guide book describes it:

  The queen has br
ought some of her most beautiful little pages and maids with her … all dressed in women’s clothes, so that nobody could tell them [apart]. And the queen put the riddle to the king … [He] ordered at once a bowl of water, and commanded [this gaudy band] to wash their faces … The pages did not hesitate to rub their faces in a masculine fashion, while the girls, bothered by a virginal modesty, hardly dared to touch the water with their fingertips …

  All these above mentioned figures,’ the guide concludes, ‘make their movements with a delightful and artistic dexterity, and so do the four Roman pikemen and the dwarf.’8 The Labyrinth with its attractions remained until 1862, when all the figures were destroyed, except for David and Goliath.

  The story of Sheba’s riddle coursed through the cultural bloodstream and reached the capillaries of street entertainment; there, it was denounced as rubbish by the learned like the seventeenth-century Dutch scholar Servatius Gallaeius, who in his attack on the Sibyls, including Sheba, adduced the test of the children as an example of Solomon’s and the queen’s entirely non-Christian trickery.9

  II

  Fairy tales similarly concern themselves with sexual distinctions, and with sexual transgression, with defining differences according to morals and mores. This interest forms part of the genre’s larger engagement with the marvellous, for the marvellous is understood to be impossible. The realms of wonder and impossibility converge, and fairy tales function to conjure the first in order to delineate the second: magic paradoxically defines normality. Hence the recurrence, in such stories, of metamorphoses, disguises and above all the impossible tasks – the adynata – of folk narrative.10 These can take an active form: that the protagonist should fill a cribbled pail with four-leaved clovers, as in Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy’s ‘Serpentin vert’, or that the questor should come neither clothed nor naked, neither riding nor walking, neither bearing a gift nor not bearing one.11 This riddling demand, made in traditional tales in many different languages, was given to King Solomon and the trickster Marcolf in medieval texts, and to the poor peasant’s clever daughter in the Russian fairy tale, collected in the nineteenth century.12 Verbal riddles do not always invite performed solutions, but Sheba’s to Solomon do, and in her role in these stories she takes the place of the lowlife, cunning figure, like Marcolf, or the quickwitted peasant girl, as she tries to have the advantage over Solomon. This riddle is solved when the subject of the challenge rides on a goat (or a hare), with one shoe off and one shoe on, one leg on the ground, draped only in a net, and carrying a hare (or a quail) which springs to freedom as soon as he or she arrives.

  The riddles posed by Sheba relate to the matter and the manner of many fairy tales, which dramatize ‘witches’ duels’: in these the heroine or hero confounds the powers of fairy evil by surpassing them in verbal adroitness, in tricksterism. The Devil turns tricks, but those who elude him can outsmart him at his own game. In one of the highly popular ballad versions of ‘The Elfin-Knight’, for instance, a story which exists in different forms all over the world (the most famous being ‘Rumpelstiltskin’, hero of the Brothers Grimm’s popular tale of that name), the heroine wrestles with the Elfin-Knight, who would snatch her away to the underworld as his bride, by using her verbal wit against his power. The Devil who has come for her in marriage sets her ten riddling questions, and she replies staunchly to all of them. He puts to her:

  O what is whiter than the milk

  Or what is softer than the silk?

  To which she replies:

  Snow is whiter than the milk

  And love is softer than the silk.

  When he asks:

  O, what is greener than the grass?

  And what is worse than woman was?

  She gives the right answer again:

  O poison’s greener than the grass

  And the devil’s worse than e’er woman was.

  With instant results:

  As sune as she the fiend did name,

  He flew away in a blazing flame.13

  Only God can remain the Unnameable: naming the Devil, knowing him for what he is, undoes his power. (Even Wittgenstein was moved to remark with regard to this type of fairy tale, ‘Profound, profound.’)14

  Turandot, Puccini’s famous opera, is one of many works to take its inspiration from a fairy tale about a haughty princess who refuses to marry, ridding herself of all suitors by setting them impossible riddles – until her heart is touched by the kiss of the prince who gives the right solutions.15 Sheba’s role, structurally, duplicates the adversary’s in these tales – she sets the riddles and is answered; she is knowledgeable, taking the part of eliciting the right answers and the correct responses, while remaining morally ambiguous herself, like the Devil or the strong, cruel female protagonist; her testing of Solomon in the folk tales becomes a prelude to their love match, an early form of the blind-date interview.

  Fairy tales likewise often seek to define, within a romantic contest, appropriate male and female conduct, to endorse the correct version and – usually – reward it with more than Solomon’s bounty of sweets. Riddles, when they are included in a fairy tale, often reflect the incestuous relationship at the core of the plot, as in the cycle of Donkeyskin tales about a father who wants to marry his daughter (see Chapter Nineteen). Other stories dramatize trials of identity in which the heroine (usually) is concealed, as it were, in a riddle, and her sex is put to the proof, as in ‘Marmoisan’, by Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier, and ‘Belle-belle, ou le Chevalier Fortuné’ by Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy.16 The high-spirited double cross-dressed tale of star-crossed lovers which Perrault may have written in collaboration with a notorious rake, the Abbé de Choisy, spoofs this basic convention of romance.17

  The literary form of the riddle, while still part of nursery lore in Britain, has more often than not split off from fairy tales themselves today. But in the early years of written wonder stories, riddles were embedded within them: Straparola’s tales in Le piacevoli notti are punctuated with double entendres presented in riddle form. These were dropped from later, literary editions, but a scholar in Germany heard one about a ‘churning-tub’ which Straparola had included, from a twelve-year-old girl at the beginning of the century.18 Another set of verses described a distaff in merry terms (‘Madam has me unceasingly, wishes me between her young fingers, or next to her thigh’), and was illustrated, in a Dutch edition of 1624, for instance, opposite a decorous engraving of a housewife alone at her spinning (here).19

  Riddles are traditional, like tunes, and it is harder to date their origin, since their style remains fairly consistent. An eighteenth-century example asks:

  I am white and stiff it is well known

  Likewise my Nose is red;

  Young ladies will as well as Joan,

  Oft take me to their Bed.

  Answer: It is a candle.’20 This is the same kind of joke as the ones about distaffs and churning-tubs. In Italy today, a favourite children’s riddle still goes: ‘What goes in hard and comes out soft?’ Again, the comedy lies in the second-guessing; the interrogator traps the listener into a dirty thought – a devilish trick. For the right answer is ‘Macaroni’.

  When printers first began directing their products at children, in the eighteenth century in Britain, they also included ‘jest books’, which told riddles.21 They are angled towards children, often in a jocular spirit; the frontispiece of The Riddle Book, or Fireside Amusements, for instance, shows a certain ‘Miss Clever’ who ‘the prize from her visitors took / By unriddling riddles in this riddle book’.22 The recurrent ribaldry in the material shows the same temper as the equivocal, slightly comic tone of the legends about the wise queen’s lower parts; her riddling, her secret knowledge, her suggestive sexuality ring in the same key as the foolish, naughty, comic, even scabrous old woman who is dubbed Mother Goose in children’s literature later.

  III

  The animal most closely associated with merriment and folly is the ass; but, paradoxically, donkeys are also the beasts most e
ndowed with powers of divination and wisdom in fairy and folklore. Indeed they rival geese in making fools of themselves and thus showing up the folly of others. The ass, whose hoof also appears to brand the body as marginal and dangerous, the outsider and the heathen, sets up such distinctions, and leads to another set of dynamic metaphors active in fairy tales. For in the same way as the genre exalts the little man (and woman) and shows up the mighty, defeats the giants and crowns the thumblings, so the stupidest of the beasts turns out to be the wisest according to the logic of the stories. This logic organizes the material of fairy tales internally, but its imagery, the costumes it assumes, are borrowed from elsewhere: and, as is the case so often, the topsy-turvy exemplar of the wise donkey can be found in the Old Testament and was passed on into secular folklore by medieval works like the Speculum humanae salvationis and the Biblia pauperum, in which Balaam and his ass, with the Queen of Sheba, are paired as unlikely but commendable prophets.23

  The distaff’s shape and role in women’s work gave rise to ripe innuendoes, couched in merry riddles. (Anon, engraving, Enigmata sive emblemata amatoria (Riddles, or Amorous Emblems) Leiden, 1624.)

  Monumental evidence exists of the pairing from an earlier date, which probably inspired the textual diffusion of the images: on both sides of the Portail Royal, the North door of Chartres Cathedral, elongated, solemn figures appear of Old Testament patriarchs and prophets. Carved around 1230, they occupy a place in the overarching scheme of the sculpture programme of the entire portal, connecting the time before the Redemption with the time after, prefiguring the New Covenant and the return of grace to the world. On the right side, one of the three lower statues is Solomon with Marcolf the jester crouched beneath his pedestal; next to him stands the Queen of Sheba, with her feet resting on a Moor; next to her Balaam with his ass.

  What is the connection? Balaam enters the Bible as another magician and foreigner, like Solomon in the first case and Sheba in the second, to be granted a vision of the truth of the Jewish god and the coming Saviour. In the Book of Numbers, Balak, King of Moab, fears the Israelites who are settling in the valley of the Jordan ‘because of their immense number’ and asks Balaam, a powerful sorcerer, to come and pronounce a curse upon them: ‘“For this I know,” he says, “the man you bless is blessed; the man you curse is accursed.”’ He sends money for the divination to Balaam by the hand of some Moabite elders, and Balaam responds that he will pray overnight to Yihweh. Yahweh warns him not to curse the Jews, and so Balaam refuses the king’s request (Num. 22: 1–14).