EnCrypted Episode 6: 'The Riddle' by Walter de la Mare
And now six episodes into our podcast series I will ask you to indulge me. For Walter de la Mare's The Riddle is dark, certainly, and creepy, maybe, but not perhaps a "horror story" in the sense we usually mean. Rest assured, eldritch horrors will return in the next episode with a reading from Lovecraft...
Written by de la Mare in 1923 as part of a collection (for children) called The Riddle and other stories, The Riddle is best taken as a dark fairytale or possible parable. That later purveyor of "strange stories" Robert Aickman was an admirer of de la Mare and, like much of Aickman's work, The Riddle is both straightforward and cryptic. It is at once suffused with meaning and yet the actual meaning may remain tantalisingly beyond our grasp.
Are the events in the story meant to be taken literally? They cannot possibly be. Is the mysterious chest into which the children disappear real or metaphor? Do the ways in which they each encounter the chest somehow predict their futures?
Needless to say, ever since its publication, readers were keen for de la Mare to explain...which he, in a manner of speaking, did.
When asked whether the children actually die in The Riddle he said "Yes." When asked if he meant the grandmother to be sinister. He said:
"The old lady was not meant to be any more sinister than...well, than she appears."*
Yours cryptically,
Jasper
(*source: Walter de la Mare's "The Riddle", A note on the teaching of literature with allegorical tendencies - Edward Wagenknech, College English, Nov. 1949, Vol.11, No 2.)
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About the episode:
"The Riddle" by Walter de la Mare was first published in The Riddle and Other Stories (1923, Selwyn & Blount). Source text online.
Theme music: The Black Waltz by Scott Buckley | www.scottbuckley.com.au Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Come Play with Me Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
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Other music sourced at: https://www.chosic.com/
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All other sound effects sourced at freesound.org
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