What is a one-sentence summary of the following article?
Reading a variety of riddles will help you understand how a riddle works. There are many books of riddles available, or you can find some online.  Many cultures have riddle traditions. Viking and Anglo-Saxon riddles are still very popular with English speakers, even though they were first told more than a thousand years ago! These riddles often have simple solutions such as “key” or “onion,” but are told in a creative way. You can find many collections online.  Riddles are also quite popular in modern fantasy literature, movies, and TV. J.R.R. Tolkien’s book The Hobbit has a whole chapter devoted to “Riddles in the Dark” told between two characters. Riddles can be about anything you can imagine, but physical objects that people are familiar with are very, very common topics.  Other topics are natural phenomena like a storm or snow, an animal, or an action. Avoid topics that are very abstract or require specialized knowledge. Some riddles are very short, just a phrase or two, while others are more like a miniature story. You can make your riddle to be any length you want, but it shouldn’t be so long that your audience can’t follow it.  Here is an example of a very short riddle from the Anglo-Saxon ‘’Book of Exeter’’, written in the 900s AD: “A wonder on the wave / water became bone.” (Answer: ice on a lake.) Here is an example of a longer riddle from the Book of Exeter: “When I am alive I do not speak. / Anyone who wants to takes me captive and cuts off my head. / They bite my bare body / I do no harm to anyone unless they cut me first. / Then I soon make them cry.” (Answer: an onion.)

Summary:
Read a lot of riddles. Decide the subject of your riddle. Determine how long you want your riddle to be.