BLACK WITHIN AND RED WITHOUT

A pocket book of riddles- but somehow they seem to me of infinitely more interest to the folklorist than to youngsters who love to stump their elders. The scholarly background is evidenced not only in the bibliography of sources but in the flavor of the riddles themselves. Too many of them deal with peasant and folk background and assume familiarity with other folk ways or living conditions of the past to fit the average American child of today. Would they think of a bathtub as something ""you use once a week""; of candles as ""lighted every night""; of a wig, a fan, of flax- as answer to a riddle? There are plays on words, puns, nursery jingles, metaphors; there's a ballad and lyric quality to the ancient rhymes. 200 traditional riddles here, most of them once current orally in the English speaking world.