Daily Inspiration Quote by J. R. R. Tolkien

A riddle that sounds like a fairy-tale object and lands like a joke: Tolkien turns the humble egg into a miniature epic. The “box” is a bait-and-switch. Boxes are human inventions, made to be opened with tools, permissions, and know-how. This one has none of that - no hinges, no key, no lid - which means the reader’s usual instincts (solve it like a lock) won’t work. You have to shift from mechanics to imagination, from hardware to nature. The delight is in that pivot.

Calling the yolk “golden treasure” is more than a cute visual. It smuggles in Tolkien’s larger obsession: value isn’t always loud, guarded, or industrial. The best riches often arrive wrapped in the ordinary, protected by living design rather than metal and bureaucracy. “Hid” keeps the old romance of secret wealth, but the secret is sitting on your breakfast plate.

Context matters: this comes out of The Hobbit’s riddle-game, a scene where language isn’t decoration but leverage. Gollum and Bilbo are fighting without swords, using wit as survival tech. Tolkien, a philologist who loved how old stories transmit culture, makes riddles do double duty: they entertain, they test character, and they remind us that intelligence can be playful rather than domineering.

The line’s rhythm and internal rhymes (“lid/hid”) give it nursery-chant momentum, an audible spell. It’s Tolkien’s signature move: making the childlike feel ancient, and making the ancient feel suddenly, intimately usable.