Rhyme & reason
Falling bridges, men in a tub, is it all just kid stuff?
Ask Chris Roberts
By Patrick T. Reardon
Tribune staff reporter
October 11, 2005
Most of the 1,000 or so American and British nursery rhymes that have come down through history are playful and silly nonsense, "Wee Willie Winkie runs through the town,/Upstairs and downstairs in his nightgown . . . "
But there are several dozen that began outside the realm of childish fantasy -- as popular songs recording historical events, as bawdy ballads about peep shows and prostitutes, as dark tales of murder and dread.
And those are the ones that Chris Roberts, a London librarian and walking-tour guide, takes up with great relish and gusto in "Heavy Words Lightly Thrown: The Reason Behind the Rhyme" (Gotham, 202 pages, $20).
The 40-year-old Roberts, who visited Chicago recently, is a compact, bright-faced man exuding a youthful zest for his subject in all its oddity.
Take Jack and Jill and their trip up the hill.
That may trace back, he notes, to a Scandinavian folk tale to explain the markings on the moon. According to this legend, the moon came to Earth to kidnap two children drawing water at a well. Now, on the moon's face, you can see the kids -- called Hjuki and Bil, in this version -- as they carry a water bucket suspended on a pole.
Or maybe it's based on "a pre-Christian tradition of gathering the first dew of May Day from a hilltop for use as a beauty treatment."
Or maybe it's about a loss of virginity, or, as Roberts puts it, "about a young couple slipping off for a bit of 'slap and tickle' and the regrets that come later."
As such comments show, Roberts employs a decidedly playful approach in analyzing the rhymes.
In some cases, the meaning and roots are clear: "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep," for instance, is about taxes during the Middles Ages with one basket of wool going to the master (the King) and another to the dame (the church). More often, though, there are a variety of theories. "Humpty-Dumpty," Roberts says, is a rhyme that "has echoes across Europe, being called 'Boule Boule' in France and 'Thille Lille' in Sweden, for example. The story in each place is the same, though: Egg sits on wall; egg falls from wall; egg smashes."
And the meanings? Well, it might be about an unwanted pregnancy. Or the fragility of the human condition.
In the 17th Century, the tune got new life and meaning when a particularly large cannon, called Humpty-Dumpty, was captured during the English Civil War by the troops of King Charles I. They turned the weapon on the Parliamentarians, but did something wrong and it exploded. "And all the King's horses and all the King's men couldn't put Humpty together again." (Charles, by the way, later also came to grief. He was beheaded in 1649.)
Not limiting himself to the history of the rhymes, Roberts takes delight in ranging far afield on tangents.
For example, he points out that "Three Blind Mice" is about the Protestants -- including several blind people -- who were burned at the stake by Queen Mary, the daughter of Henry VIII. This leads him to ruminate for a couple of pages on how, despite its history of bloody religious conflict, Britain later became a haven for those fleeing religious persecution.
And this leads him to British religious views today: "Amusingly, according to the 2001 census, the Star Wars religion of Jedi makes up 0.7 percent of the population, while Christians account for 72 percent and Muslims 3 percent. Jedi therefore outnumber the 329,000 Sikhs, 260,000 Jews and 144,000 Buddhists who filled in the forms."
The loose-limbed approach that Roberts employs in writing about nursery rhymes is rooted in the walking tours he's led in London each summer over the past four years. "A lot of the book was me emptying my head," he says.
That's where many of the stories, facts and factoids came from. And the focus of nursery rhymes.
In leading tours, Roberts says, he quickly learned that children grew bored much sooner than their parents. So, to keep their interest level high, he wove into his tours stops at places and buildings that had featured -- or were thought to feature -- in nursery rhymes, such as the site of the old London Bridge.
It worked like a charm.
But, in case it didn't, he had a fallback position, sure to keep the little ones enthralled -- visits to London locations seen onscreen in the Harry Potter movies.
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preardon@tribune.com
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Stories behind the verses: Sometimes, the meaning of a nursery rhyme is obvious. For others, though, there are a lot of theories. Here are several rhymes with explanations based on "Heavy Words Lightly Thrown" by Chris Roberts:
RING-A-RING O'ROSES
Ring-a-ring o'roses
A pocketful of posies
Atish-oo! Atish-oo!
We all fall down!
(Alternative version)
Ring around the rosy,
A pocketful of posies,
Ashes, ashes, We all fall down!
This may be about the Black Death (bubonic plague) which devastated Europe from the 14th through the 17th centuries -- with the rhyme functioning as an incantation to ward off the disease. Or it may simply be a tale of the plague: roses or rosies referring to the spots on the skin of a victim; posies referring to the practice of putting flowers in one's clothes to keep the disease at bay; sneezes (or ashes from burning victims' bodies and clothing); death.
Or it may be a children's game to get around the Puritan prohibition against dancing, and the fall down was a curtsy.
YANKEE DOODLE
Yankee Doodle came to town,
Riding on a pony.
He stuck a feather in his cap,
And called it macaroni.
Originally a song in which British soldiers made fun of the rag-tag rebel American soldiers, the Yankees adopted it as a favorite marching song.
Riding a pony rather than a horse may signify relative poverty. The feather and macaroni refer to putting on airs, for in the 1770s, fashionable London dandies, newly returned from the Grand Tour of Europe, decked themselves out in extreme styles and called themselves Macaronis.
WHERE, OH WHERE
Oh where, oh where has my little dog gone?
Oh where, oh where can he be?
With his ears cut short and his tail cut long,
Oh where, oh where can he be?
This children's tune is actually the first verse of an 1864 satirical song by Septimus Winner in which the drunken singer discovers at the end that the disappearance of his hound may have something to do with the sausage and bologna he's eating.
SING A SONG OF SIXPENCE
Sing a song of sixpence,
A pocket full of rye,
Four and twenty black-birds,
Baked in a pie.
When the pie was opened,
The birds began to sing,
Now, wasn't that a dainty dish
To set before the King?
Long ago, cooks used to bake little clay whistles, shaped like the heads of birds with their beaks open, into the pastry tops of pies. When the pie was cut, cold air would meet the hot contents, and steam would rise through the whistles, creating a kind of birdsong.
Many believe this rhyme with its second verse about "a maid in the garden" is about Henry VIII and two of his wives, Catherine of Aragon and the "maid" who took her place, Anne Boleyn. The snipping off of the maid's nose in the second verse is thought to refer to the snipping off of Anne's head by Henry's executioner. Another theory is that this is about Henry forcing English monks ("blackbirds") to give up the deeds to their monasteries.
HERE WE GO ROUND THE MULBERRY BUSH
Here we go round the mulberry bush,
The mulberry bush, the mulberry bush,
Here we go round the mulberry bush,
On a cold and frosty morning.
In England, mulberry trees were planted in prison yards, and someone who had been "round the mulberry bush" was an ex-con. How this relates to the use of the mulberry bush in this child's tune is unclear.
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