Tolkien (em sua carta 110 ao seu editor ) parece feliz em admitir que, embora vários dos " Enigmas no Escuro " eram tradicionais (e por isso foram adaptados por ele em vez de serem obras originais de ficção ), todos os outros eram seu próprio trabalho e que nenhum deles exigiu qualquer atribuição adicional, uma vez que os autores eram históricos / desconhecidos:
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