A nursery rhyme is a traditional poem or song for children in Britain and other European countries, but usage of the term dates only from the late 18th/early 19th century. The term Mother Goose rhymes is interchangeable with nursery rhymes.
30-496: " This Is the House That Jack Built " is a popular English nursery rhyme and cumulative tale . It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 20854. It is Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index type 2035. This is perhaps the most common set of modern lyrics: Some versions use "cheese" instead of "malt", "judge" instead of "priest", "rooster" instead of "cock", the archaic past tense form "crew" instead of "crowed", "shook" instead of "tossed", or "chased" in place of "killed". Also in some versions
60-436: A child fall asleep. Lullabies can be found in every human culture. The English term lullaby is thought to come from "lu, lu" or "la la" sounds made by mothers or nurses to calm children, and "by by" or "bye bye", either another lulling sound or a term for a good night. Until the modern era, lullabies were usually recorded only incidentally in written sources. The Roman nurses' lullaby, "Lalla, Lalla, Lalla, aut dormi, aut lacta",
90-572: A doodle doo ", which date from at least the late 16th century. Nursery rhymes with 17th-century origins include, " Jack Sprat " (1639), " The Grand Old Duke of York " (1642), " Lavender's Blue " (1672) and " Rain Rain Go Away " (1687). The first English collection, Tommy Thumb's Song Book and a sequel, Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book , were published by Mary Cooper in London in 1744, with such songs becoming known as "Tommy Thumb's songs". A copy of
120-581: A nursery rhyme in the form of a riddle is " As I was going to St Ives ", which dates to 1730. About half of the currently recognised "traditional" English rhymes were known by the mid-18th century. More English rhymes were collected by Joseph Ritson in Gammer Gurton's Garland or The Nursery Parnassus (1784), published in London by Joseph Johnson . In the early 19th century, printed collections of rhymes began to spread to other countries, including Robert Chambers ' Popular Rhymes of Scotland (1826) and in
150-455: A sequel, Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book , were published by Mary Cooper in 1744. Publisher John Newbery 's stepson, Thomas Carnan, was the first to use the term Mother Goose for nursery rhymes when he published a compilation of English rhymes, Mother Goose's Melody, or Sonnets for the Cradle (London, 1780). The oldest children's songs for which records exist are lullabies , intended to help
180-786: Is now known as) nursery rhymes, including in Scotland Sir Walter Scott and in Germany Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim in Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1806–1808). The first, and possibly the most important academic collection to focus in this area was James Halliwell-Phillipps ' 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
210-435: 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 17th century. For example, a well-known lullaby such as " Rock-a-bye Baby ", could not be found in records until
240-576: Is the horse...", would be quite difficult to untangle if the previous ones were not present. See the Noun Phrase for more details about postmodification of the noun phrase in this manner. The rhyme continues to be a popular choice for illustrated children's books, with recent examples by Simms Taback and Quentin Blake showing how illustrators can introduce a fresh angle and humour into a familiar tale. During California's shelter in place order in response to
270-589: The COVID-19 pandemic , Freeman Ng created The House We Sheltered In , a picture book that could be freely downloaded and printed out on home printers. The popularity of the rhyme can be seen in its use in a variety of other cultural contexts, including: Nursery rhyme From the mid-16th century nursery rhymes began to be recorded in English plays, and most popular rhymes date from the 17th and 18th centuries. The first English collections, Tommy Thumb's Song Book and
300-700: The Homeric Iliad , especially those found in the 10th-century manuscripts discovered by Villoison in 1781 in the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice (see further Venetus A , Homeric scholarship ), which are based on Aristarchus and his school. The scholia on Hesiod , Pindar , Sophocles , Aristophanes and Apollonius Rhodius are also extremely important. In Latin , the most important are those of Servius on Virgil ; of Acro and Porphyrio on Horace ; and of Donatus on Terence . Also of interest are
330-482: The Iliad ). The practice of compiling scholia continued to late Byzantine times, outstanding examples being Archbishop Eustathius ' massive commentaries to Homer in the 12th century and the scholia recentiora of Thomas Magister , Demetrius Triclinius and Manuel Moschopoulos in the 14th . Scholia were altered by successive copyists and owners of the manuscript, and in some cases, increased to such an extent that there
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#1732855915476360-655: The German Kniereitvers , the child is put in mock peril, but the experience is a pleasurable one of care and support, which over time the child comes to command for itself. Research also supports the assertion that music and rhyme increase a child's ability in spatial reasoning , which aids mathematics skills. Sources Scholium Scholia ( sg. : scholium or scholion , from Ancient Greek : σχόλιον , "comment", "interpretation") are grammatical , critical, or explanatory comments – original or copied from prior commentaries – which are inserted in
390-460: The United States, Mother Goose's Melodies (1833). From this period, the origins and authors of rhymes are sometimes known—for instance, in " Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star " which combines the melody of an 18th-century French tune " Ah vous dirai-je, Maman " with a 19th-century English poem by Jane Taylor entitled "The Star" used as lyrics. Early folk song collectors also often collected (what
420-532: The early and mid-20th centuries, this was a form of bowdlerisation , concerned with some of the more violent elements of nursery rhymes and led to the formation of organisations like the British "Society for Nursery Rhyme Reform". Psychoanalysts such as Bruno Bettelheim strongly criticised this revisionism, because it weakened their usefulness to both children and adults as ways of symbolically resolving issues and it has been argued that revised versions may not perform
450-452: The functions of catharsis for children, or allow them to imaginatively deal with violence and danger. In the late 20th century, revisionism of nursery rhymes became associated with the idea of political correctness . Most attempts to reform nursery rhymes on this basis appear to be either very small scale, light-hearted updating, like Felix Dennis's When Jack Sued Jill – Nursery Rhymes for Modern Times (2006), or satires written as if from
480-477: The horse, the hound, and the horn are left out and the rhyme ends with the farmer. It is a cumulative tale that does not tell the story of Jack's house, or even of Jack who built the house, but instead shows how the house is indirectly linked to other things and people, and through this method tells the story of "The man all tattered and torn", and the "Maiden all forlorn", as well as other smaller events, showing how these are interlinked. It has been argued that
510-490: The ideas about the links between rhymes and historical persons, or events, can be traced back to Katherine Elwes' book The Real Personages of Mother Goose (1930), in which she linked famous nursery rhyme characters with real people, on little or no evidence. She posited that children's songs were a peculiar form of coded historical narrative, propaganda or covert protest, and did not believe that they were written simply for entertainment. There have been several attempts across
540-399: The late-18th century when it was printed by John Newbery (c. 1765). A French poem, similar to "Thirty days hath September", numbering the days of the month, was recorded in the 13th century. From the later Middle Ages, there are records of short children's rhyming songs, often as marginalia . From the mid-16th century, they began to be recorded in English plays. " Pat-a-cake " is one of
570-571: The latter is held in the British Library . John Newbery 's stepson, Thomas Carnan, was the first to use the term Mother Goose for nursery rhymes when he published a compilation of English rhymes, Mother Goose 's Melody, or, Sonnets for the Cradle (London, 1780). 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. One example of
600-416: The margin of the manuscript of ancient authors, as glosses . One who writes scholia is a scholiast . The earliest attested use of the word dates to the 1st century BC. Ancient scholia are important sources of information about many aspects of the ancient world, especially ancient literary history . The earliest scholia, usually anonymous, date to the 5th or 4th century BC (such as the scholia minora to
630-693: The mid-sixteenth century. There is a possible reference to the song in The Boston New Letter of 12 April 1739 and the line: "This is the man all forlorn, &c". However, it did not appear in print until it was included in Nurse Truelove's New-Year's-Gift, or the Book of Books for Children , printed in London in 1755. It was printed in numerous collections in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Randolph Caldecott produced an illustrated version in 1878 which proved to be extremely popular. Many of
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#1732855915476660-474: The oldest surviving English nursery rhymes. The earliest recorded version of the rhyme appears in Thomas d'Urfey 's play The Campaigners from 1698. Most nursery rhymes were not written down until the 18th century when the publishing of children's books began to move from polemic and education towards entertainment, but there is evidence for many rhymes existing before this, including " To market, to market " and " Cock
690-475: The point of view of political correctness to condemn reform. The controversy in Britain in 1986 over changing the language of " Baa, Baa, Black Sheep " because it was alleged in the popular press, that it was seen as racially dubious, was based only on a rewriting of the rhyme in one private nursery, as an exercise for the children. It has been argued that nursery rhymes set to music aid in a child's development. In
720-496: The rhyme is derived from an Aramaic (Jewish) hymn Chad Gadya ( lit. , "One Young Goat") in Sepher Haggadah , first printed in 1590; but although this is an early cumulative tale that may have inspired the form, the lyrics bear little relationship. It was suggested by James Orchard Halliwell that the reference to the "priest all shaven and shorn" indicates that the English version is probably very old, presumably as far back as
750-715: The scenes in his pictures are of northern Shropshire where he spent his youth. Cherrington Manor , a timber-framed house in North East Shropshire , with a malt house in the grounds, is believed locally to have inspired Caldecott's depiction of the House that Jack built, although the Ralph Caldecott Society states that Brook House Farm in Hamner is more likely. Each sentence in the story is an example of an increasingly deeply nested relative clause . The last version, "This
780-579: The scholia on Juvenal attached to the good manuscript P; while there are also scholia on Statius , especially associated with the name Lactantius Placidus . Some ancient scholia are of sufficient quality and importance to be labelled "commentaries" instead. The existence of a commercial translation is often used to distinguish between "scholia" and "commentaries". The following is a chronological list of ancient commentaries written defined as those for which commercial translations have been made: [REDACTED] This article incorporates text from
810-492: The time of Sabine Baring-Gould 's A Book of Nursery Songs (1895), folklore was an academic study full of comments and footnotes. A professional anthropologist, Andrew Lang (1844–1912) produced The Nursery Rhyme Book in 1897. The early years of the 20th century are notable for the illustrations of children's books, including Randolph Caldecott 's Hey Diddle Diddle Picture Book (1909) and Arthur Rackham 's Mother Goose (1913). The definitive study of English rhymes remains
840-405: The work of Iona and Peter Opie . Many nursery rhymes have been argued to have hidden meanings and origins. John Bellenden Ker Gawler (1764–1842), for example, wrote four volumes arguing that English nursery rhymes were written in "Low Saxon", a hypothetical early form of Dutch. He then "translated" them back into English, revealing in particular a strong tendency to anti-clericalism . Many of
870-474: The world to revise nursery rhymes (along with fairy tales and popular songs). As recently as the late 18th century, rhymes like " Little Robin Redbreast " were occasionally cleaned up for a young audience. In the late 19th century, the major concern seems to have been violence and crime, which led some children's publishers in the United States like Jacob Abbot and Samuel Goodrich to change Mother Goose rhymes. In
900-453: Was no longer room for them in the margin, and it became necessary to make them into a separate work. At first, they were taken from one commentary only, and subsequently from several. This is indicated by the repetition of the lemma ("headword"), or by the use of such phrases as "or thus", "alternatively", "according to some", to introduce different explanations, or by the explicit quotation of different sources. The most important are those on
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