The Origins of Famous Nursery Rhymes

If you delve deeply enough into stories by the Brothers Grimm, you will discover that a majority of their stories are about violence and horrible ways of getting murdered. Yet these stories are read to our children as "kid" stories, sometimes right before bed as bedtime stories. Many things that we deep to be childish have histories that are nothing short of horrifying or simply surprising.

Nursery rhymes are no exception. Some of the very first rhymes that kids learn are really about events in history, usually satirizing the royal and political realities of the period. For some reason, the messages behind nursery rhymes have all but become obsolete, and today these rhymes are sometimes called nonsense rhymes. So what is the real message behind well-known nursery rhymes? This article aims to shed some light on that.

Mother Goose - We begin with the name associated with nursery rhymes. There is some dispute regarding where the name originated. Some believe that it is a reference to Queen Goosefoot, the mother of Charlemagne, who was also a patron of children. She is thought to be the one referred to in the collection of short stories by Charles Perrault entitled "Tales of Mother Goose" in 1697. An alternate theory suggests that the true origin of mother goose was actually "Mother Goose's Melodies" by Thomas Fleet in 1719, whose mother-in-law's name was Elizabeth Vergoose. Wherever the true origin lays, Mother Goose has become synonymous with nursery rhymes.

Rock a Bye Baby - If you've ever listened to the words of 'Rock a Bye Baby' closely, you might have become alarmed at the message it seemed to be sending. Why would mothers put a child to sleep with the threat of falling out of a tree? In fact, the words to this rhyme (and lullaby) describe a Native American practice of placing a baby in the branches of a tree, and allowing it to be lulled to sleep by the rocking of the branches in the wind.