Week 12 Storytelling: Riddle Me This

On my way back from town, I met my neighbor Tom as he was tending his field of wheat.

"How as your journey?" he asked with sweat running down his forehead. I myself was perspiring quite a bit as I had traveled far on this unusually hot day.

"It was long and tiring," I confessed, "and rather peculiar as well."

"Peculiar how?" Tom asked intrigued.

"As I was going to St. Ives I met a man with seven wives," I explained.

Harbor in St. Ives, Cornwall
(Geof Sheppard)

"Seven wives? Why, that's an ungodly amount. Not just in the holy sense, but what man would want to have seven wives to provide for and listen to?" Tom joked.

"It gets even stranger," I told him. "Each wife had seven sacks. Each sack had seven cats. Each cat had seven kits."

"Kits, cats, sacks, wives. This must have been the oddest procession. How did each woman carry seven sacks, each with seven cats in it and each of their seven kits? That seems quite impossible," Tom exclaimed.

"Yes, it was the oddest sight, indeed. The cats and kits were all rather small actually, much smaller than your average cat and kitten. I suppose that helped some. There were bags hanging all over these women, though. It was like they were pack mules, all trailing one another as if in some strange parade."

"This will make a good story to tell the other folk in the village," Tom said shaking his head.

"Oh, I intend to," I told him. "In fact, I'm going to make a riddle out of it. Let's see if you can figure it out."

"Let's see if we can all figure it out," Tom replied, climbing over his fence. We headed into the heart of the village and gathered everyone together to hear my ingenious riddle. Once everyone was settled and quite, I began.

"As I was going to St. Ives I met a man with seven wives. Each wife had seven sacks. Each sack had seven cats. Each cat had seven kits. Kits, cats, sacks, wives. How many were there going to St. Ives?"

There was silence while everyone pondered the question on their own, but soon they were working as a group trying to solve it.

"Well seven cats in a bag with seven kits each makes 49 right?" one man asked.

"No, you dolt," his wife scolded him. "There are 49 kits plus the 7 cats which makes 56 in one sack."

"If there are 7 sacks of 56 on a wife... what's 56 times 7?" the baker wondered.

"392," answered his boy, who he'd sent to university through his hard labor.

"If that's how many are on each of the 7 wives... what's 392 time 7?" the butcher chimed in. It took the boy a little while longer to come up with the sum this time.

"2744," he finally answered. "Plus the 7 wives makes 2751!"

"That's wrong," I said, shaking my head.

"You forgot the man!" someone said. "It's 2752!"

"That's still incorrect," I informed them smugly, enjoying my little game. They started through the whole problem again, this one yelling at that one for not counting right. I thought the whole village would get into a row if I didn't stop them and give them the answer.

"Alright, alright!" I called over the roar of the crowd, bringing them back to attention. "I'll tell you the answer."

The silence was so deep you might have been able to hear the feet of the man and his wives somewhere far down the road.

"The answer is one," I said, very satisfied with myself that I had tricked them all. "I was the one going to St. Ives. I met them on the road but they were going to other direction." The whole crowd laughed at how silly they had been and then began to ask questions about the man and all his wives and cats. Every time someone from my village met someone not from the village, they would tell them the St. Ives riddle. It was of the most well-known riddles, but very few get the answer right on the first try.

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Author's Note: This story is built around the riddle As I Was Going to St. Ives from the Nursery Rhyme Book edited by Andrew Lang (1897). The riddle the narrator tells in my story is the exact same as the riddle in the book. I just added a story around the riddle and gave the answer to the riddle because one isn't given in the book. There has always been a dispute, though, about what the "real" answer is. Some people count up only all the people, some include the cats, some even include the sacks for some odd reason. Personally, I think "one" is the right answer because many riddles try to distract you with extraneous information when the answer is actually really simple.