The secret life of nursery rhymes
I can vaguely recall when I first learned that the nursery rhyme ‘Ring a Ring o’ Roses’ might not be as innocent as it seemed at first blush. Just recently, my 10-year-old daughter claimed that ‘Humpty Dumpty’ was actually about the death of an English king. This made me wonder, how many of these songs have a dark backstory?
The popular (although disputed) theory is that the sweet-sounding song ‘Ring a Ring o’ Roses’ is in fact an account of England’s Great Plague of 1665–66 from the perspective of a child:
Ring-a-ring o' roses,
A pocket full of posies,
A-tishoo! A-tishoo!
We all fall down.
In this version, common in England, the ‘ring’ of ‘roses’ was the red rash plague victims would experience, along with sneezing (a-tishoo). ‘Posies’ were the dried herbs people carried in the hope these would ward off the disease, while ‘we all fall down’ is an illusion to death – or at least that’s the interpretation.
Similarly, there are scholars who believe the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme is an account of King Richard III of England’s last fatal battle at Bosworth Field in 1485:
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
All the King's horses
And all the King's men,
Couldn't put Humpty together again.
Supporters of this theory (including my daughter) claim Richard's horse was in fact named ‘Wall’, although there doesn't seem to be a lot of scholarly research to back this up. Other theories suggest the ‘Humpty Dumpty’ referred to in the rhyme was a siege engine used in the English Civil War during the 1643 Siege of Gloucester. Another theory has the ‘Humpty Dumpty’ as a cannon mounted on the city walls of Colchester that had a ‘great fall’ when fired and was too heavy to be remounted.
Obviously they can’t all be right, or can they? Like fairy tales, nursery rhymes vary considerably, with anthropologists recording different versions in different regions, and even greater variation across different countries and cultures. These primarily oral exchanges were only formalised when someone (usually the abovementioned anthropologists) put them in writing.
Many of the fairy tales we know today were recorded by the brothers Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm, who drew heavily on the earlier work of Charles Perrault and combined elements of different stories they collected to create their own.
So perhaps it is possible that the people singing these nursery rhymes associated them with real-world events happening at the time (or in the recent past), maybe even adapting the lyrics as they did so to suit their purposes. But as there was never a single, definitive version of the lyrics, it is all but impossible to give a definitive interpretation of their meaning.
And yet, this doesn’t seem to bother children in playgrounds and school yards all around the world, singing songs about rings of roses and Humpty’s downfall.
