Lewis Carroll Riddles | Trap Door | The Mad Hatter | Alice in Wonderland (2024)

Now, you might be asking yourself what sort of riddles and stories would a social outcast like Carroll write? Well, we’re here to answer for you, as we specialize in puzzles at Trap Door.

Lewis Carroll’s most famous work, and perhaps the culmination of his quirkiness and active imagination is the renowned novel,Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Through young Alice’s travels down the wicked maze of the rabbit hole, she becomes a guest at a “mad” tea party along with the Hatter, the March Hare, and a very tired Dormouse. Here, the Mad Hatter reveals to Alice thatthey have tea all day because Time punished the Hatter by eternally standing still at 6 PM, traditional tea time.The characters at tea dole out riddle after riddle to Alice.

In order to make time go by faster, or at the very least to entertain themselves the whole cast of bizarre characters at the tea party dole out riddle after riddle to Alice.

It is during this time that the Hatter lampoons Alice with this puzzling question.

Arguably the craziest of the characters at the table, the Mad Hatter, asks her the now infamous riddle. “Why is a Raven like a Writing Desk?” Out of all of the Lewis Carroll Riddles, this one is by far the wackiest.

Alice ponders the question. She rolls it around in her mind like hot tea sipped from in a porcelain cup that is clutched by a shaking hand. She figures, she fidgets. Much to her frustration, she cannot produce an answer.

He was just asking for no reason at all. Alice sighed at the Mad Hatter’s response and says, “I think you might do something better with the time, then waste it in asking riddles that have no answers.” The Mad Hatter replies, “If you knew Time as well as I do, you wouldn’t talk about wasting it. It’s him.”

For Alice’s part, she becomes insulted and tired of being bombarded with riddles and she leaves, saying it is the stupidest tea party that she has ever been to.

The riddle was so wildly insane that Carroll felt obliged years later to answer it himself, via an updated version. He himself proposed the answer in the 1897 final revision of Alice’s Adventures. A raven is like a writing desk because, ”Because it can produce a few notes, though they are very flat; and it is never put with the wrong end in front!”

The early issues of the revision spell “never” as “nevar”, ie “raven.” Some conjecture that a overzealous proofreader, while typesetting, fixed the intended error. Many were introduced to the unanswered riddle in their formative years. It got under people’s skin and itched and bothered them like a bed bug, just as it did to Alice, and still does to this day.