I like to think that, as Troy was a vassal state of the Hittite Empire, Priam or Paris was at Kadesh. 
Don’t be silly. Paris is in France.
Oh wait, are you saying they moved it from Turkey?
So the French are Hittites?
Wow. The rabbit hole goes deeper and deeper.
Worse yet, they’re Jews. I mean, if they really say Kadesh.
Well, some of them are Hutterites.
No, Paris is in Texas. I’ve been there.
I love this !
People often say, in all seriousness (I realise that the above, is in jest) that many nursery rhymes were originally political satire – “Mary quite contrary”, etc. I tend to suspect that they might always have been just nursery rhymes; and the “satire” stuff, crap dreamed up to impress people. Anyway, this Miss Muffet job is the most ingenious and imaginative such exercise that I’ve ever come across.
Can we get Aram back? I bet that with the slightest baiting we could get him to serve up with a frothy helping of Armenian Massacre denial, or at least of the Kurd’s participation in it.
. . . when the walls fell.
It’s actually quite clear that the stories of the supposed origins of nursery rhymes as the descriptions of political and historical events are pretty much all wrong:
Hittitler? I never touched her!
See Heavy Words Lightly Thrown: The Reason Behind the Rhyme, by Chris Roberts.
Thanks. I was surprised at how well it came together when I started working on it.
For anyone who may have thought I was serious, I’ll point out the poem was written about a hundred years before the events I described.
You’re welcome. I do feel that with sufficient ingenuity and twisted-mindedness, any bit of inane rhyming can be made out to be commentary on any political or historical situation, from any age. I don’t rule out, some such rhymes being indeed initially socio-political. In recent posts, Wendell Wagner would seem to be indicating that the popular explanation of one particular rhyme as such, is a load of bull; while BrainGlutton, is on the “they were commentary / satire” side. I just gut-feel that folk have a tendency to mistakenly over-intellectualise things.
Personally – though not Catholic, I have rather a soft spot for our Mary Tudor; and hope that the interpretation of the “Quite contrary” rhyme about her, which has the silver bells and cockleshells and pretty maids, referring to instruments of torture – is mistaken. I generally gather that she suffers to some extent, from “the victors writing the history”; and that for all her extreme Catholic zeal, she was personally a decent character and a kindly soul, who greatly wished that her subjects might be brought back to the true faith by non-violent and reasoned persuasion and preaching, not by coercion…
The only Hittites I know of were from the first Age of Empires game. They weren’t too good because, even though they had double siege weapon HP and +1 archery range, they couldn’t build any Ballistas. I hope modern Kurds, if they are the same people, solved this technological mistake
Some of them were. E.g., I doubt Marjorie Daw or Solomon Grundy stands for any historical figure. Sometimes a rhyme is only a rhyme. But some nursery rhymes have known histories. “Hark, Hark, the Dogs Do Bark” is definitely political.
This is a much more interesting subject than the Hittites.
Blasphemer!! I’d stay away from mirrors if I were you.
Wouldn’t it be cool to hit on a Hittite?
They did actually! I was up in Kurdistan (Kirkuk) fairly recently and they’d moved to +3 AK-47’s and +9 RPG’s, along with a few other tricky things like mortars and a small bit of artillery and even armor!
Regards,
-Bouncer-
Every time I see this thread title, it morphs in my brain to something about herds of kittens.
“Cry, ‘Kerfuffle!’ And let slip the kits of war!”
– Julius Felis, Whiskers Shakespeare