The Secret Origins of Nursery Rhymes
Posted July 6, 2007 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
You’ve heard them in the schoolyard, you listened to them at bedtime and you may be singing them to your own children, but what exactly are nursery rhymes, and where did they come from?
Any Internet search will bring up dozens of pages claiming to know the ‘secret origins’ of these rhyming verses. Whether those origins are true or not may never be known, but there are a number of common threads linking most of the best-known classics.
Many of the older ones are purported to be the equivalent of the civil rights songs of the 70’s, the characters and figures in the rhymes being the authority figures of the day. Since open criticism of the ruling class, be it in print or even spoken aloud, was usually punished by imprisonment or execution, the poems were used by peasants to express their dissatisfaction.
For example, Little Jack Horner could be interpreted as being a story from the 1530’s, when King Henry VIII broke away from the Catholic Church and began the systematic dissolution of all the monasteries in England (so they could be looted and their riches stolen). Jack Horner was supposedly the steward of a bishop who did not want his abbey taken, and so sent Horner with a bribe (baked in a pie to thwart thieves) to prevent this from happening. Whether the bribe ever arrived isn’t known, but regardless the abbey was taken and the bishop eventually executed.
An interesting theory about three blind mice, is that it refers to the daughter of King Henry VIII, Queen Mary I (also known as ‘Bloody Mary’) whose violent persecution of Protestants led her to convict three noblemen (the three blind mice) who were protestants and had them burned at the stake.
However, Leslie McGrath, who holds a PhD on the subject, says the origins of most nursery rhymes remain shrouded in mystery and may never be known.
“Every reputable scholar will say ‘this is not the definitive story’,” says McGrath. “Unless you’ve got an author who signed the name and it’s provable, you don’t know who wrote it, what it’s based on. The older the rhyme is, the more speculative your derivations are.”
Can you name all of these common nursery rhymes from a single line? Click on the verse to see the answer.
1. If you have no daughters, give them to your sons
2. The little dog laughed to see such sport
3. They licked the platter clean
5. It followed her to school one day, which was against the rule;
7. So she gave them some broth without any bread
8. For they left their tails behind them
Answers
7. Old woman who lived in a shoe.
8. Little Bo Peep.
