A Little Book of Filipino Riddles

In Filipino schoolyards and homes, children have always asked each other: "What has eyes but cannot see?" The answer: a potato. These aren't mere puzzles, they're compact poems of perception, tiny lenses into how Filipinos have historically seen and shaped their world. Frederick Starr's early 20th-century collection gathers riddles from across the Philippine islands, preserving them in their original languages: Tagalog, Visayan, Ilocano, and others. The imagery is rooted in everyday Filipino life: the palay in the fields, the kanin in the pot, the bahay by the river. Some riddles carry the fingerprint of Spanish colonization; others are ancient and untraceable. What emerges is a living portrait of a culture that found magic in the mundane and made art out of asking questions. This little book is both time capsule and invitation, preserving oral traditions that might otherwise have dissolved into silence while offering modern readers a chance to play along.