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.
74-683: Humpty Dumpty is a character in an English nursery rhyme , probably originally a riddle and one of the best known in the English-speaking world . He is typically portrayed as an anthropomorphic egg , though he is not explicitly described as such. The first recorded versions of the rhyme date from late eighteenth-century England and the tune from 1870 in James William Elliott 's National Nursery Rhymes and Nursery Songs . Its origins are obscure, and several theories have been advanced to suggest original meanings. Humpty Dumpty
148-465: A trochaic metre, which is common in nursery rhymes. The melody commonly associated with the rhyme was first recorded by composer and nursery rhyme collector James William Elliott in his National Nursery Rhymes and Nursery Songs (London, 1870), as outlined below: The earliest known version was published in Samuel Arnold 's Juvenile Amusements in 1797 with the lyrics: Humpty Dumpty sat on
222-423: A double or veiled meaning, put forth as a puzzle to be solved. Riddles are of two types: enigmas , which are problems generally expressed in metaphorical or allegorical language that require ingenuity and careful thinking for their solution, and conundra , which are questions relying for their effects on punning in either the question or the answer. Archer Taylor says that "we can probably say that riddling
296-797: A form of folk-literature, sometimes in verse. Riddles have also been collected in Tamil. While riddles are not numerous in the Bible, they are present, most famously in Samson's riddle in Judges xiv.14, but also in I Kings 10:1–13 (where the Queen of Sheba tests Solomon 's wisdom), and in the Talmud . Sirach also mentions riddles as a popular dinner pastime, while the Aramaic Story of Ahikar contains
370-570: A good riddle can furnish a good metaphor." Literary riddles were also composed in Byzantium , from perhaps the tenth century with the work of John Geometres , into the fifteenth century, along with a neo-Byzantine revival in around the early eighteenth century. There was a particular peak around the long twelfth century. Two Latin riddles are preserved as graffiti in the Basilica at Pompeii . The pre-eminent collection of ancient Latin riddles
444-660: A local scale, and across great distances. Kofi Dorvlo gives an example of a riddle that has been borrowed from the Ewe language by speakers of the neighboring Logba language : "This woman has not been to the riverside for water, but there is water in her tank". The answer is "a coconut". On a much wider scale, the Riddle of the Sphinx has also been documented in the Marshall Islands , possibly carried there by Western contacts in
518-733: A long section of proverbial wisdom that in some versions also contains riddles. Otherwise, riddles are sparse in ancient Semitic writing. In the medieval period, however, verse riddles, alongside other puzzles and conundra, became a significant literary form in the Arabic-speaking world, and accordingly in Islamic Persian culture and in Hebrew — particularly in Al-Andalus . Since early Arabic and Persian poetry often features rich, metaphorical description, and ekphrasis , there
592-487: A number of riddles, mostly apparently inspired by folk-riddles. Other Hebrew-writing exponents included Moses ibn Ezra , Yehuda Alharizi , Judah Halevi , Immanuel the Roman and Israel Onceneyra . In both Arabic and Persian, riddles seem to have become increasingly scholarly in style over time, increasingly emphasising riddles and puzzles in which the interpreter has to resolve clues to letters and numbers to put together
666-641: 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
740-522: A point of playing with conceptual boundaries and crossing them for the intellectual pleasure of showing that things are not quite as stable as they seem" — though the point of doing so may still ultimately be to "play with boundaries, but ultimately to affirm them". The modern English word riddle shares its origin with the word read , both stemming from the Common Germanic verb * rēdaną , which meant 'to interpret, guess'. From this verb came
814-427: A process known as entropy , a measure of the number of specific ways in which a system may be arranged, often taken to be a measure of "disorder". The higher the entropy, the higher the disorder. After his fall and subsequent shattering, the inability to put him together again is representative of this principle, as it would be highly unlikely (though not impossible) to return him to his earlier state of lower entropy, as
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#1732773386972888-522: A schoolbook. It is thought that the world's earliest surviving poetic riddles survive in the Sanskrit Rigveda . Hymn 164 of the first book of the Rigveda can be understood to comprise a series of riddles or enigmas which are now obscure but may have been an enigmatic exposition of the pravargya ritual . These riddles overlap in significant part with a collection of forty-seven in
962-517: A series of riddles posed by a nature-spirit ( yaksha ) to Yudhishthira . The first riddle collection in a medieval Indic language is traditionally thought to be the riddles of Amir Khusrow (1253–1325), which are written in Hindawi , in verse, in the mātrika metre . As of the 1970s, folklorists had not undertaken extensive collecting of riddles in India, but riddling was known to be thriving as
1036-644: A strict sense. About 150 survive in Middle High German , mostly quoted in other literary contexts. Likewise, riddles are rare in Old Norse : almost all occur in one section of Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks , in which the god Óðinn propounds around 37 riddles (depending on the manuscript). These riddles do, however, provide insights into Norse mythology , medieval Scandinavian social norms, and rarely attested poetic forms. By contrast, verse riddles were prominent in early medieval England , following
1110-508: 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", 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
1184-609: A walking stick. This type includes riddles along the lines of this German example: Zweibein sass auf Dreibein und ass Einbein. Da kam Vierbein und nahm Zweibein das Einbein. Da nahm Zweibein Dreibein und schlug damit Vierbein, dass Vierbein Einbein fallen liess. Two-legs sat on Three-legs and ate One-leg. Then Four-legs came and took One-leg from Two-legs. Then Two-legs took Three-legs and with it struck Four-legs, so that Four-legs let One-leg go. The conceit here
1258-399: A wall, Humpti Dumpti had a great fall; Threescore men and threescore more, Cannot place Humpty dumpty as he was before. In 1842, James Orchard Halliwell published a collected version as: Humpty Dumpty lay in a beck. With all his sinews around his neck; Forty Doctors and forty wrights Couldn't put Humpty Dumpty to rights! Evidence of an alternative American version closer to
1332-447: A wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. Four-score Men and Four-score more, Could not make Humpty Dumpty where he was before. A manuscript addition to a copy of Mother Goose 's Melody published in 1803 has the modern version with a different last line: "Could not set Humpty Dumpty up again". It was published in 1810 in a version of Gammer Gurton's Garland . (Note: Original spelling variations left intact.) Humpty Dumpty sate on
1406-500: Is a collection of 100 hexametrical riddles by Symphosius which were influential on later medieval Latin writers. The Bern Riddles , a collection of Latin riddles clearly modelled on Symphosius, were composed in the early seventh century by an unknown author, perhaps in northern Italy. Symphosius's collection also inspired a number of Anglo-Saxon riddlers who wrote in Latin. They remained influential in medieval Castilian tradition, being
1480-653: Is a natural overlap in style and approach between poetry generally and riddles specifically; literary riddles are therefore often a subset of the descriptive poetic form known in both traditions as wasf . Riddles are attested in anthologies of poetry and in prosimetrical portrayals of riddle-contests in Arabic maqāmāt and in Persian epics such as the Shahnameh . Meanwhile, in Hebrew, Dunash ben Labrat (920–990), credited with transposing Arabic metres into Hebrew, composed
1554-474: Is a universal art" and cites riddles from hundreds of different cultures including Finnish, Hungarian, American Indian, Chinese, Russian, Dutch and Filipino sources amongst many others. Many riddles and riddle-themes are internationally widespread. In the assessment of Elli Köngäs-Maranda (originally writing about Malaitian riddles, but with an insight that has been taken up more widely), whereas myths serve to encode and establish social norms, "riddles make
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#17327733869721628-604: Is also a common literary allusion, particularly to refer to a person in an insecure position, something that would be difficult to reconstruct once broken, or a short and fat person. Humpty Dumpty also makes an appearance in Lewis Carroll 's Through the Looking-Glass (1871). There Alice remarks that Humpty is "exactly like an egg", which Humpty finds to be "very provoking" in the looking-glass world . Alice clarifies that she said he looks like an egg, not that he
1702-625: Is evidence for many rhymes existing before this, including " To market, to market " and " Cock 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
1776-574: Is no longer posed as a riddle, since the answer is now so well known. Similar riddles have been recorded by folklorists in other languages, such as "Boule Boule" in French , "Lille Trille" in Swedish and Norwegian , and "Runtzelken-Puntzelken" or "Humpelken-Pumpelken" in different parts of Germany—although none is as widely known as Humpty Dumpty is in English. The rhyme does not explicitly state that
1850-816: 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
1924-413: Is one. They then go on discuss semantics and pragmatics when Humpty Dumpty says, "my name means the shape I am". A. J. Larner suggested that Carroll's Humpty Dumpty had prosopagnosia on the basis of his description of his finding faces hard to recognise: "The face is what one goes by, generally," Alice remarked in a thoughtful tone. "That's just what I complain of," said Humpty Dumpty. "Your face
1998-522: Is that Two-legs is a person, Three-legs is a three-legged stool, Four-legs is a dog, and One-leg is a ham hock. An example of Four Hang; Two Point the Way , to which the pre-eminent solution is 'cow' is given here in thirteenth-century Icelandic form: Fjórir hanga, fjórir ganga, tveir veg vísa, tveir hundum varða, einn eptir drallar ok jafnan heldr saurugr. Heiðrekr konungr, hyggðu at gátu! Four are hanging, Four are walking, Two point
2072-454: Is the same as everybody has—the two eyes,—" (marking their places in the air with his thumb) "nose in the middle, mouth under. It's always the same. Now if you had the two eyes on the same side of the nose, for instance—or the mouth at the top—that would be some help." James Joyce used the story of Humpty Dumpty as a recurring motif of the Fall of Man in the 1939 novel Finnegans Wake . One of
2146-638: The Adevineaux amoureux (printed in Bruges by Colard Mansion around 1479); and Demandes joyeuses en maniere de quolibets , the basis for Wynkyn de Worde 's 1511 Demaundes Joyous . Riddles survive only fragmentarily in Old High German : three, very short, possible examples exist in manuscripts from the Monastery of St Gallen , but, while certainly cryptic, they are not necessarily riddles in
2220-477: The Greek Anthology , which contains about 50 verse riddles, probably put into its present form by Constantine Cephalas , working in the tenth century CE. Most surviving ancient Greek riddles are in verse. In the second chapter of Book III of Aristotle's Rhetoric , the philosopher stated that "good riddles do, in general, provide us with satisfactory metaphors: for metaphors imply riddles, and therefore
2294-519: The Oxford English Dictionary , in the 17th century, the term "humpty dumpty" referred to a drink of brandy boiled with ale . The riddle probably exploited, for misdirection, the fact that "humpty dumpty" was also eighteenth-century reduplicative slang for a short and clumsy person. 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. The rhyme
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2368-514: The Atharvaveda ; riddles also appear elsewhere in Vedic texts . Taylor cited the following example: '"Who moves in the air? Who makes a noise on seeing a thief? Who is the enemy of lotuses? Who is the climax of fury?" The answers to the first three questions, when combined in the manner of a charade, yield the answer to the fourth question. The first answer is bird ( vi ), the second dog ( śvā ),
2442-468: The West Germanic noun * rādislī , literally meaning 'thing to be guessed, thing to be interpreted'. From this comes Dutch raadsel , German Rätsel , and Old English * rǣdels , the latter of which became modern English riddle . Defining riddles precisely is hard and has attracted a fair amount of scholarly debate. The first major modern attempt to define the riddle in modern Western scholarship
2516-424: The 17th century. For example, a well-known lullaby such as " Rock-a-bye Baby ", could not be found in records until 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
2590-478: 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 Riddle A riddle is a statement , question or phrase having
2664-567: The King's white hall. Here, a snowflake falls from the sky, and is blown off by the wind. The riddle was at times a prominent literary form in the ancient and medieval world, and so riddles are extensively, if patchily, attested in our written records from these periods. More recently, riddles have been collected from oral tradition by scholars in many parts of the world. According to Archer Taylor, "the oldest recorded riddles are Babylonian school texts which show no literary polish". The answers to
2738-457: The Royalist defenders in the siege of 1648 . In 1648, Colchester was a walled town with a castle and several churches and was protected by the city wall. The story given was that a large cannon, which the website claimed was colloquially called Humpty Dumpty, was strategically placed on the wall. A shot from a Parliamentary cannon succeeded in damaging the wall beneath Humpty Dumpty, which caused
2812-467: The Russian phrase "Nothing hurts it, but it groans all the time" can be deployed as a proverb (when its referent is a hypochondriac) or as a riddle (when its referent is a pig). Much academic research on riddles has focused on collecting, cataloguing, defining, and typologising riddles. Key work on cataloguing and typologising riddles was published by Antti Aarne in 1918–20, and by Archer Taylor . In
2886-467: 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
2960-617: The Vulgar Tongue noted that a "Humpty Dumpty" was "a short clumsey [ sic ] person of either sex, also ale boiled with brandy"; no mention was made of the rhyme. Punch in 1842 suggested jocularly that the rhyme was a metaphor for the downfall of Cardinal Wolsey ; just as Wolsey was not buried in his intended tomb, so Humpty Dumpty was not buried in his shell. Professor David Daube suggested in The Oxford Magazine of 16 February 1956 that Humpty Dumpty
3034-483: The basis for the second set of riddles in the thirteenth-century Libro de Apolonio , posed by Apolonio's daughter Tarsiana to her father. The perhaps eighth- or ninth-century Veronese Riddle is a key witness to the linguistic transition from Latin to Romance, but riddles are otherwise rare in medieval romance languages. However, in the early modern period, printed riddle collections were published in French, including
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3108-466: The book was or where it was found. It has been pointed out that the two additional verses are not in the style of the seventeenth century or of the existing rhyme, and that they do not fit with the earliest printed versions of the rhyme, which do not mention horses and men. American actor George L. Fox (1825–1877) helped to popularise the nursery rhyme character in nineteenth-century stage productions of pantomime versions, music, and rhyme. The character
3182-625: The cannon to tumble to the ground. The Royalists (or Cavaliers, "all the King's men") attempted to raise Humpty Dumpty on to another part of the wall, but the cannon was so heavy that "All the King's horses and all the King's men couldn't put Humpty together again". Author Albert Jack claimed in his 2008 book Pop Goes the Weasel: The Secret Meanings of Nursery Rhymes that there were two other verses supporting this claim. Elsewhere, he claimed to have found them in an "old dusty library, [in] an even older book", but did not state what
3256-417: The case of ancient riddles recorded without solutions, considerable scholarly energy also goes into proposing and debating solutions. Whereas previously researchers had tended to take riddles out of their social performance contexts, the rise of anthropology in the post-War period encouraged more researchers to study the social role of riddles and riddling, highlighting their role of re-orienting reality in
3330-653: The conventions of Old English heroic and religious poetry. While medieval records of Germanic-language riddles are patchy, with the advent of print in the West, collections of riddles and similar kinds of questions began to be published. A large number of riddle collections were printed in the German-speaking world and, partly under German influence, in Scandinavia. Riddles were evidently hugely popular in Germany:
3404-537: 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
3478-421: The entropy of an isolated system never decreases. 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 a sequel, Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book , were published by Mary Cooper in 1744. Publisher John Newbery 's stepson, Thomas Carnan,
3552-660: The face of fear and anxiety. However, wide-ranging studies of riddles have tended to be limited to Western countries, with Asian and African riddles being relatively neglected. Riddles have also attracted linguists, often studying riddles from the point of view of semiotics ; meanwhile, the twenty-first century has seen the rise of extensive work on medieval European riddles from the point of view of eco-criticism , exploring how riddles can inform us about people's conceptualisation and exploration of their environment. Many riddles appear in similar form across many countries, and often continents. Borrowing of riddles happens both on
3626-452: 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
3700-490: 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
3774-552: The last two centuries. Key examples of internationally widespread riddles follow, based on the classic (European-focused) study by Antti Aarne . The basic form of the writing-riddle is 'White field, black seeds', where the field is a page and the seeds are letters. An example is the eighth- or ninth-century Veronese Riddle : Se pareba boves alba pratalia araba albo versorio teneba negro semen seminaba In front of him (he) led oxen White fields (he) ploughed A white plough (he) held A black seed (he) sowed. Here,
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#17327733869723848-631: 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
3922-474: The mid-16th century, they began to be recorded in English plays. " Pat-a-cake " is one of 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
3996-416: The modern received rhyme quoted above is given by William Carey Richards in the issue of a children's magazine for 1843, where he comments that he had come across it as a riddle when he was five-years old and that the answer was "an egg". Humpty-dumpty sit upon a wall, Humpty-dumpty had a great fall; All the king's horses and all the king's men Couldn't put humpty-dumpty together again. According to
4070-555: The most easily recognizable references is at the end of the second chapter, in the first verse of the Ballad of Persse O'Reilly : Have you heard of one Humpty Dumpty How he fell with a roll and a rumble And curled up like Lord Olofa Crumple By the butt of the Magazine Wall, (Chorus) Of the Magazine Wall, Hump, helmet and all? Humpty Dumpty has been used to demonstrate the second law of thermodynamics . The law describes
4144-675: The only Old English riddle to be attested in another manuscript besides the Exeter Book). Unlike the pithy three-line riddles of Symphosius, the Old English riddles tend to be discursive, often musing on complex processes of manufacture when describing artefacts such as mead ( Exeter Book Riddle 27 ) or a reed-pen or -pipe ( Exeter Book Riddle 60 ). They are noted for providing perspectives on the world which give voice to actors which tend not to appear in Old English poetry, ranging from female slaves to animals and plants, and they often subvert
4218-470: The oxen are the scribe's finger(s) and thumb, and the plough is the pen. Among literary riddles, riddles on the pen and other writing equipment are particularly widespread. The year-riddle is found across Eurasia. For example, a riddle in the Sanskrit Rig Veda , from around 1500–1000 BCE, describes a 'twelve-spoked wheel, upon which stand 720 sons of one birth' (i.e. the twelve months of
4292-480: 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
4366-420: The riddles are not preserved; the riddles include "my knees hasten, my feet do not rest, a shepherd without pity drives me to pasture" (a river? A rowboat?); "you went and took the enemy's property; the enemy came and took your property" (a weaving shuttle?); "who becomes pregnant without conceiving, who becomes fat without eating?" (a raincloud?). These may be riddles from oral tradition that a teacher has put into
4440-658: The seminal composition of one hundred and one riddles by Aldhelm (c. 639–709), written in Latin and inspired by the fourth- or fifth-century Latin poet Symphosius . Aldhelm was followed by a number of other Anglo-Saxons writing riddles in Latin. This prestigious literary heritage contextualises the survival of nearly one hundred riddles in the tenth-century Exeter Book , one of the main surviving collections of Old English verse. The riddles in this book vary in subject matter from ribald innuendo to theological sophistication. Three, Exeter Book Riddle 35 and Riddles 40/66 , are in origin translations of riddles by Aldhelm (and Riddle 35
4514-615: The subject is an egg, possibly because it may have been originally posed as a riddle . There are also various theories of an original "Humpty Dumpty". One, advanced by Katherine Elwes Thomas in 1930 and adopted by Robert Ripley , posits that Humpty Dumpty is King Richard III of England , depicted as hunchbacked in Tudor histories and particularly in Shakespeare's play , and who was defeated, despite his armies, at Bosworth Field in 1485. In 1785, Francis Grose 's Classical Dictionary of
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#17327733869724588-537: The third sun ( mitra ), and the whole is Vishvamitra , Rama 's first teacher and counselor and a man noted for his outbursts of rage'. Accordingly, riddles are treated in early studies of Sanskrit poetry such as Daṇḍin 's seventh- or eighth-century Kāvyādarśa . Early narrative literature also sometimes includes riddles, prominently the Mahabharata , which for example contains the Yaksha Prashna ,
4662-492: 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
4736-508: The way out, Two ward the dogs off, One ever dirty Dangles behind it. This riddle ponder O prince Heidrek! The cow has four teats, four legs, two horns, two back legs, and one tail. The featherless bird-riddle is best known in Central Europe. An English version is: White bird featherless Flew from Paradise, Perched upon the castle wall; Up came Lord John landless, Took it up handless, And rode away horseless to
4810-600: The word which is the riddle's solution. Riddles have been collected by modern scholars throughout the Arabic-speaking world. Riddles are known to have been popular in Greece in Hellenistic times, and possibly before; they were prominent among the entertainments and challenges presented at symposia . Oracles were also represented as speaking in often riddlic language. However, the first significant corpus of Greek riddles survives in an anthology of earlier material known as
4884-405: 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
4958-479: 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
5032-416: The year, which together supposedly have 360 days and 360 nights). The most famous example of this type is the riddle of the Sphinx . This Estonian example shows the pattern: Hommikul käib nelja, lõuna-ajal kahe, õhtul kolme jalaga It goes in the morning on four feet, at lunch-time on two, at evening on three The riddle describes a crawling baby, a standing person, and an old person with
5106-600: Was a "tortoise" siege engine , an armored frame, used unsuccessfully to approach the walls of the Parliamentary-held city of Gloucester in 1643 during the Siege of Gloucester in the English Civil War . This was on the basis of a contemporary account of the attack, but without evidence that the rhyme was connected. The theory was part of an anonymous series of articles on the origin of nursery rhymes and
5180-550: Was by Robert Petsch in 1899, with another seminal contribution, inspired by structuralism , by Robert A. Georges and Alan Dundes in 1963. Georges and Dundes suggested that "a riddle is a traditional verbal expression which contains one or more descriptive elements, a pair of which may be in opposition; the referent of the elements is to be guessed". There are many possible sub-sets of the riddle, including charades , droodles , and some jokes . In some traditions and contexts, riddles may overlap with proverbs . For example,
5254-491: Was described as an egg. The rhyme is listed in the Roud Folk Song Index as No. 13026. The rhyme is one of the best known in the English language. The common text from 1882 is: Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king's horses and all the king's men Couldn't put Humpty together again. It is a single quatrain with external rhymes that follow the pattern of AABB and with
5328-417: Was popularized in the United States on Broadway by actor George L. Fox in the pantomime musical Humpty Dumpty . The show ran from 1868 to 1869, for a total of 483 performances. As a character and literary allusion, Humpty Dumpty has appeared or been referred to in many works of literature and popular culture, particularly English author Lewis Carroll 's 1871 book Through the Looking-Glass , in which he
5402-515: 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 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
5476-484: Was widely acclaimed in academia, but it was derided by others as "ingenuity for ingenuity's sake" and declared to be a spoof. The link was nevertheless popularized by a children's opera All the King's Men by Richard Rodney Bennett , first performed in 1969. From 1996, the website of the Colchester tourist board attributed the origin of the rhyme to a cannon recorded as used from the church of St Mary-at-the-Wall by
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