Tolkien (i hans bokstaven 110 till sin utgivare ) verkar gärna erkänna att även om flera av " Riddles in the Dark " var traditionella (och var därför anpassade av honom snarare än att vara helt originalverk av fiktion ), alla andra var hans eget arbete och att ingen av dem krävde ytterligare tillskrivning eftersom författarna var historiska / okända:
110 From a letter to Allen & Unwin 20 September 1947
[Tolkien's American publishers, the Houghton Mifflin Co., applied to Allen & Unwin for permission to use several riddles from The Hobbit in an anthology of poetry. Allen & Unwin suggested to Tolkien that 'the riddles were taken from common folk lore and were not invented by you'.]
As for the Riddles: they are 'all my own work' except for 'Thirty White Horses' which is traditional, and 'No-legs'. The remainder, though their style and method is that of old literary (but not 'folk-lore') riddles, have no models as far as I am aware, save only the egg-riddle which is a reduction to a couplet (my own) of a longer literary riddle which appears in some 'Nursery Rhyme' books, notably American ones. So I feel that to try and use them without fee would be about as just as walking off with somebody's chair because it was a Chippendale copy, or drinking his wine because it was labelled 'port-type'. I feel also constrained to remark that 'Sun on the Daisies' is not in verse (any more than 'No-legs') being but the etymology of the word 'daisy', expressed in riddleform