the morbid meanings behind nursery rhymes...does anyone have any good links?

Question

or...share your favorites with me...

Answer 1

First... with ring around the rosie....

Although folklorists have been collecting and setting down in print bits of oral tradition such as nursery rhymes and fairy tales for hundreds of years, the earliest print appearance of "Ring Around the Rosie" did not occur until the publication of Kate Greenaway's Mother Goose or The Old Nursery Rhymes in 1881. For the "plague" explanation of "Ring Around the Rosie" to be true, we have to believe that children were reciting this nursery rhyme continuously for over five centuries, yet not one person in that five hundred year span found it popular enough to merit writing it down. (How anyone could credibly assert that a rhyme which didn't appear in print until 1881 actually "began about 1347" is a mystery. If the rhyme were really this old, then "Ring Around the Rosie" antedates even Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and therefore we would have examples of this rhyme in Middle English as well as Modern English forms.)
So, what does "Ring Around the Rosie" mean, then? Folklorist Philip Hiscock suggests:

The more likely explanation is to be found in the religious ban on dancing among many Protestants in the nineteenth century, in Britain as well as here in North America. Adolescents found a way around the dancing ban with what was called in the United States the "play-party." Play-parties consisted of ring games which differed from square dances only in their name and their lack of musical accompaniment. They were hugely popular, and younger children got into the act, too. Some modern nursery games, particularly those which involve rings of children, derive from these play-party games. "Little Sally Saucer" (or "Sally Waters") is one of them, and "Ring Around the Rosie" seems to be another. The rings referred to in the rhymes are literally the rings formed by the playing children. "Ashes, ashes" probably comes from something like "Husha, husha" (another common variant) which refers to stopping the ring and falling silent. And the falling down refers to the jumble of bodies in that ring when they let go of each other and throw themselves into the circle.

http://www.snopes.com/language/literary/rosie.htm

Then there is the lost stanzas and verses of Nursery rhymes which both lightens and darkens the erstwhile interpretation of said darker meanings behind the verse.

http://www.rhymes.org.uk/lost-lyrics-old-nursery-rhymes.htm

Then check out the secret history of the nursery rhyme...
including encoding of political messages disguised as children's rhyme...

http://www.rhymes.org.uk/nursery-rhyme.htm

Wikipedia as usual has some interesting information on the rhyme...broad though it may be...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nursery_rhyme

ifyou are looking to debunk urban myths as well as find out more info on nursery rhymes...then the following link is for you...these guys specialize in urban myths...

http://www.snopes.com/

here you can read about the influence the dak side of fairy tales and nursery rhymes hadon this writer....and the book she has written of an updated fairy tale...

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=9679

few explore the darkside of children's stories like Bruno Bettelheim in his "Uses of Enchantment"

http://home.earthlink.net/~jcorbally/eng218/ruses.html

http://www.creativeresistance.ca/communitas/the-uses-of-enchantment-bruno-bettleheim.htm

here this author talks of the uses of the darkside in nursery rhymes and how to help the child...(Good grief!)

http://www.carynsolutions.com/Docs/The%20Healing%20Power%20of%20Storybook%20Solutions.pdf

http://www.dailynews.lk/2004/11/18/fea08.html

and if you just want to plain scratch your head...

http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30000-13512455,00.html

http://www.carynsolutions.com/StoryBookSolutions.htm

hope this helps...

Answer 2

Truth Behind Nursery Rhymes

Answer 3

Actually Rock-a-bye-baby is from the Native American people. They use to place their babies in slings that hung from the lower branches of trees. However these branches were susceptible to breaking and would fall often causing serious injury to the baby and even death. The rhyme was written by a white settler who witnessed just such an event.
Queen Mary 1 is a popular one for the rhymes. Mary, Mary and Three Blind Mice are examples. Mary, Mary either addresses her inability to have children or her penchant for torture and murder, you pick. Three Blind Mice addresses the blinding and execution of three Protestant bishops, the blood of which she may have tasted.
Blow the Man Down is a cheerful sea shanty about beating the crew.
Here We Go 'Round the Mulberry Bush is about Wakefield prison. The mothers would teach their children how to stay alive and more or less healthy by teaching them how to keep the prison clean. The prison sat on low ground and was prone to flooding and all the fun sicknesses that come with standing water.
There is so much wrong with Ten Little Indians.
She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain is based on the slave-era song When the Chariot Comes, a song about the Rapture.
London Bridge is Falling Down is either about the Vikings burning bridges, not likely, or immurement. Immurement is the practice of entombing someone within a structure, where they slowly starve to death. In this case the "someone" they are referring to are children.
There are several theories on Humpty Dumpty. My favorite is the cannon.
Baa, Baa Black Sheep references slavery, mocks it really.
Jack Be Nimble was a form of fortune telling or
Jimmy Crack Corn is about slavery, sort of.
Georgie Porgie is about a gay sex scandal involving King Charles 1.
Goosey Goosey Gander is about killing Catholics, especially priests.

By the way you learn some interesting things about where words come from while reading some of this stuff.

Answer 4

This Site Might Help You.

RE:
the morbid meanings behind nursery rhymes...does anyone have any good links?
or...share your favorites with me...

Answer 5

Ashes ashes we all fall down...

When the bough breaks the cradle will fall...

This is an interesting subject. Like fairy tales which were almost all fairly morbid, nursery rhymes were used to prepare young people for the cruel reality of life.

It's only in a too comfortable world that we rot kids minds with happy purple dinosaurs.

Life could get rough on a kid who grew up in that kind of googoo land, I suspect.

Answer 6

Be careful with the answers you receive, most will be wrong. The origins of most nursary are NOT morbid but are innocent. Many people have attributed the morbid meaning AFTER the fact and are wrong. Snopes.com and TheStraightDope.com are good sites to check the accuracy of such rumors.

Don't believe it when people tell you where words came from, most times these stories are rumors and are not historically sound. For example:

1. Ring around the rosies had NOTHING at all to do with the black plague--it was around for hundreds of years prior to the black plague.
2. The word "tip" as in "I'm leaving the waitress a tip." Does NOT come from "To Insure Promptness"
3. The F--k word does NOT come from ANY acronym.
4. The word "cop" does NOT come from the title "Constable On Patrol."

And on and on and on. The world is filled with misinformation and only those who read a lot and research themselves learn the truth about such things.

Answer 7

Hello. -

Mary Ann Cotton, She's dead and she's rotten! She lies in her bed with her eyes wide open. Sing, sing! Oh, what can I sing? Mary Ann Cotton is tied up with string. Where, where? Up in the air, selling black puddings a penny a pair.

*Victorian Nursery Rhyme about Britain's first female serial killer.*

Have a nice day. :)

Answer 8

I remember an old Disney program that actually talked about some of the darker meanings. (It might have been a wonderful world of...)
Besides ring around the rosies, I remeber them talking about Mary, Mary was about the rif with Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, and that rock-a-bye baby dealt with a scandal that toppled a royal household.

Answer 9

they all have different meanings but they are fun to sing when you're little. In ring around the rosie i just liked falling down. i didnt know or care that it actually meant dying.

Answer 10

The queen of hearts is actually about a love affair. And ring around the rosie is about small pox or some deadly disease. I'm really not sure which it is.

Answer 11

the morbid meaning of ring around the rosie one is a myth
http://www.snopes.com/language/literary/rosie.htm

a don't have a link, but here's some interpretations I've heard:
Humpty-Dumpty refered to a king who was overthrown

the old lady who lived in a shoe was homeless, a shoe was the inside coutyard of an house or apartment.

In Jack and Jill, Jack falls down and breaks his crown, basically he broke his head open and died (your crown is your head in British English).