|
|
|
|
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.
oldest children's songs of which we have records are lullabies, intended to help a child sleep.
Discussion
Ask a question about 'Nursery rhyme' Start a new discussion about 'Nursery rhyme' Answer questions from other users |
Encyclopedia
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.
Lullabies
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. The English term lullaby is throught 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. 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.
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. 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 thought to have been created by an immigrant to American and to record the native American habit of hanging birch bark cradles from the branches of trees, but is not recorded until the late eighteenth century.
Early nursery rhymes
From the later middle ages we have records of short children's rhyming songs, often as marginalia. From the mid-sixteenth century they begin to be recorded in English plays. 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.
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'. 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. 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. Roughly half of the current body recognised 'traditional' English rhymes were known by the mid-eighteenth century.
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). 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.
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). 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). 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.
Some exegeses
Many believe that Ring around the Rosies has a connection with the great plague. However, due to the fact that the rhyme is believed to have been around since before the plague, this stands as 'potentially discredited'.
The way that a phrase or custom will last ages after the original significance of it has been forgotten is astonishing. Certainly some nursery rhymes have been lost, as nursery rhymes are mainly an oral tradition passed down for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years. Because of the lack of literacy throughout much of history, no written records of them would have been made.
Nursery rhyme revisionism
There have been several movements, across the world, to make nursery rhymes (along with fairy tales and popular songs) "politically correct". Psychoanalysts such as Bruno Bettelheim strongly criticized this revisionism, on the grounds that it weakened their usefulness to both children and adults as ways of symbolically resolving issues. Such revised versions may not perform the functions of catharsis for children, or allow them to imaginatively deal with violence and danger. Also, a society as a whole may be the poorer for it, because it loses opportunities to discuss obsolete values, even repulsive ones.
See also
|
| |
|
|
