Every now and then, you come across an explanation for the supposed story behind this or that Mother Goose rhyme, often claiming that what we tell as a childish nursery rhyme actually stands for a specific event in English history, political commentary, or a metaphor for a real individual of note. Examples:
“Ring Around the Rosies” is a metaphor for the Black Death.
Humpty Dumpty was a big fat cannon that was mounted on the wall of a fort and used during the English Civil War; this specific cannon eventually blew up on one charge.
“Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary” refers to Mary, Queen of Scots and her clumsy, ill-fated reign.
Little Miss Muffet was Patience, the daughter or stepdaughter of an entomologist called Dr. Thomas Muffet (died 1604), who also studied spiders.
But many of these have been discredited as having no real evidence behind them. The morbid Ring Around the Rosies interpretation seems to be among the most fantastical.
Is there any nursery rhyme for which there is compelling evidence that it was composed for adults to commemorate a known event, immortalize a character, etc.?
Or is looking for metaphors in Mother Goose a fool’s errand and are the vast majority of these just silly rhyming stories composed for reciting or singing to children?
Baa Baa Black Sheep was first published in 1744. However, most scholars claim that this rhyme is based on the reality of life in feudal times in England in general and the export tax for wool farmers of 1275 created by King Edward I
Many people believe they know the origins of Ring a Ring o’ Roses: The Black Death (1348) or the Great Plague (1665) (thus the chanting of “a tishoo” and “we all fall down” [dead]). Nonetheless, this association is modern according to scholars who now doubt the relationship between either of the events and the rhyme. Their reasoning is that the first known documenting of the rhyme is 1881, much later than either plague
I’m not sure of the origin but it’s featured pretty prominently in Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll. And in the illustration, Humpty is an egg. I wonder if that was the first time he was depicted as an egg, and did the characterization stick?
I have only ever conceptualized him as an egg.
ETA: According to wiki:
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in the seventeenth century, the term “humpty dumpty” referred to a drink of brandy boiled with ale.[8] The riddle probably exploited, for misdirection, the fact that “humpty dumpty” was also eighteenth-century reduplicative slang for a short and clumsy person.[13] The riddle may depend upon the assumption that a clumsy person falling off a wall might not be irreparably damaged, whereas an egg would be.
So I guess it’s not mentioned explicitly since you’re supposed to guess he’s an egg.
It did mention a cannon in that article but the link does not appear established. It looks like the war in question happened centuries before the rhyme became popular.
That’s what Wikipedia says. The reason I quoted the cannon story is because I wanted to give an example of an explanation that’s supposedly been debunked and ask if there are any nursery rhyme explanations that – in contrast – have been attested.
I don’t know the answer for sure, but it seems unlikely to me that average people were creating rhymes with complex metaphors to stand for certain events or things. If you take a lot of Carroll’s creations, for example, they really were just silly stories for children. The political connotation came from the illustrator John Tenniel who was a political cartoonist. And they had a lot of conflict over that.
But you know, by drawing Humpty with his little cravat, maybe Tenniel made that about the fragility of the aristocracy or something, I don’t know.
But I doubt most people were thinking that way. I’m thinking about how rarely symbolism ends up in popular music. Our modem nursery rhymes aren’t metaphors, either. So we would have to either believe that children were particularly well-informed enough to come up with these, or that adults came up with them and then taught them to children for some reason. Most things that adults taught children in that era were instructional, cautionary tales with some sort of explicit moral, which Carroll did very much rebel against by turning moralistic children’s poetry into silly nonsense.
Humpty Dumpty wore a cravat in the illustrations because he wore a cravat in the story. Poor Alice, however, couldn’t tell if it was a cravat or a belt.
Read it again when you have a chance. Those books are really wonderful – if you didn’t know what a cravat was, you probably missed a lot of wordplay, too. You can get annotated versions, too, where they explain all the context, the original rhymes that Carroll was copying, and so on.
The Pied Piper of Hamelin is at least partially based on a true event that occurred in 1284 where a traveling recruiter convinced a large number of the town’s young adults to emigrate to the eastern reaches of Germany.