Nursery rhyme

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For the UNKLE song by the same name, see Psyence Fiction (Album).
See also: Children's music and Children's songs

"Hey Diddle Diddle" is a popular nursery rhyme.

The term nursery rhyme is used for ‘traditional’ songs for young children in Britain
and many English speaking countries, but usage only dates from the nineteenth century
and in North America the older ‘Mother Goose Rhymes’ is still often used.[1]

Contents
[hide]

• 1 History
o 1.1 Lullabies
o 1.2 Early nursery rhymes
o 1.3 The nineteenth century
• 2 Meanings of nursery rhymes
• 3 Nursery rhyme revisionism
• 4 Notes

• 5 See also

[edit] History
[edit] Lullabies

Main article: lullaby

The oldest children's songs of which we have records are lullabies, intended to help a
child sleep. Lullabies can be found in every human culture.[2] The English term lullaby
is thought to come from 'lu, lu' or 'la la' sound made by mothers or nurses to calm
children, and 'by by' or 'bye bye', either another lulling sound, or a term for good
night.[3] Until the modern era lullabies were usually only recorded incidentally in written
sources. The Roman nurses' lullaby, 'Lalla, Lalla, Lalla, aut dormi, aut lacte', is recorded
in a scholium on Persius and may be the oldest to survive.[4]

Many medieval English verses associated with the birth of Jesus take the form of a
lullaby, including 'Lullay, my liking, my dere son, my sweting' and may be versions of
contemporary lullabies.[5] However, most of those used today date from the seventeenth
century onwards. Probably the most famous 'Rock-a-bye, baby on a tree top' is not
recorded until the late eighteenth century.[6]

[edit] Early nursery rhymes

From the later middle ages we have records of short children's rhyming songs, often as
marginalia.[7] From the mid-sixteenth century they begin to be recorded in English
plays.[8] Most nursery rhymes were not written down until the eighteenth century, when
the publishing of children's books began to move from polemic and education towards
entertainment, but we have evidence for many rhymes existing before this, including 'To
market, to market' and 'Cock a doodle doo', which date from at least the late sixteenth
century.[9]

The first English collections were Tommy Thumb's Song Book and a sequel, Tommy
Thumb's Pretty Song Book, are both thought to have been published before 1744, and at
this point such songs were known as 'Tommy Thumb's songs'.[10] The publication of
John Newbery's, Mother Goose's Melody, or, Sonnets for the Cradle (c.1785), is the first
record we have of many classic rhymes, still in use today.[11] These rhymes seem to have
come from a variety of sources, including traditional riddles, proverbs, ballads, lines of
Mummers' plays, drinking songs, historical events, and, it has been suggested, ancient
pagan rituals.[12] Roughly half of the current body recognised 'traditional' English
rhymes were known by the mid-eighteenth century.[13]

[edit] The nineteenth century

In the early nineteenth century printed collections of rhymes began to spread to other
countries, including Robert Chambers's Popular Rhymes of Scotland (1826) and in the
United States, Mother Goose's Melodies (1833).[14] From this period we sometimes
know the origins and authors of rhymes, like 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star', which
combined an eighteenth-century French tune with a poem by English writer Jane Taylor
and 'Mary Had a Little Lamb', written by Sarah Josepha Hale of Boston in 1830.[15]

Early folk song collectors also often collected (what were now known as) nursery
rhymes, including in Scotland Sir Walter Scott and in Germany Clemens Brentano and
Achim von Arnim in Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1806-8).[16] The first, and possibly the
most important academic collection to focus in this area was James Orchard Halliwell's,
The Nursery Rhymes of England (1842) and Popular Rhymes and Tales in 1849, in
which he divided rhymes into: antiquities (historical), fireside stories, game-rhymes,
alphabet-rhymes, riddles, nature-rhymes, places and families, proverbs, superstitions,
customs, and nursery songs (lullabies).[17] By the time of Sabine Baring-Gould's A Book
of Nursery Songs (1895), folklore was an academic study, full of comments and foot-
notes. A professional anthropologist, Andrew Lang (1844-1912) produced The Nursery
Rhyme Book in 1897. The early years of the twentieth century are notable for the
illustrations to children's books including Caldecott's Hey Diddle Diddle Picture Book
(1909) and Arthur Rackham's Mother Goose (1913). The definitive study of English
rhymes remains the work of Iona and Peter Opie.[18]

[edit] Meanings of nursery rhymes

Hidden meanings and origins of nursery rhymes have often asserted, but are usually
speculative and frequently obviously erroneous, often failing to take into account the
known history and early versions of a rhyme.[19] A number of these theories have their
origins in the writings of John Bellenden Ker (?1765-1842), who argued in four
volumes that English nursery rhymes were actually written in 'Low Dutch', a medieval
language of his own invention. He then 'translated' them back into English, revealing
particularly a strong tendency to anti-clericalism.[20] Many of the ideas about the links
between rhymes and historical persons, or events, can be traced back to Katherine
Elwes, The Real Personages of Mother Goose (1930), which found identities for (then
famous) characters in nursery rhymes on little or no evidence in any historical source,
assuming that children's songs are a peculiar form of coded historical narrative,
propaganda or covert protest, and rarely considering that they could be just
entertainments.[19][21]