![]() ![]() The tale is based on the canonical present-day version of the rhyme, which reads: According to this tale, the nursery rhyme is a cultural memory of the plague-either the one of 1660 or even the Black Death of the fourteenth century. The reason for my including so many versions in different languages is because of the persistent false etymology that has attached to the rhyme. One for Jack and one for Jim and one for little Moses!Īt Edgmond, where this game is a favorite with very little children, the last line runs, “A curchey in, and a curchey out, and curchey all together,” curtseying accordingly. A ring, moving around, till the last line, when they stand and imitate sneezing. ![]() It is one of the first to incorporate sneezing into the song. Rolland:įinally, we get this version from 1886, recorded in Charlotte Burne’s Shropshire Folk-Lore. Other English versions recorded by Newell in 1883 are:Īnd there is this Parisian version also recorded in 1883 by E. ![]() Kate Greenaway’s 1881 Mother Goose has this English version: They played “hide and seek,” “ring, ring a rosy," and a thousand wild and pretty games for the place was so beautiful, and the day so bright, the little rogues quite forgot that they were in the Poor House, or had ever been sick in the whole course of their lives.Īnother German version is recorded in 1857, this one from Switzerland, in Ernst Rochholz’s Alemannisches Kinderlied und Kinderspiel aus der Schweiz:Īn Italian version from Venice is recorded in 1874 by Giuseppe Bernoni: Then the little girls began to seek their own amusements. Half-a-dozen little girls, lame, or among the convalescent sick, volunteered to gather the flowers, and some of the larger boys were up among the branches of the elm tree, garlanding them with ropes of the coarser blossoms. They sat beneath a great elm tree back of the Hospital, with a heap of flowers between them, out of which they twined a world of bouquets, fairy garlands, and pretty crowns. The rhyme appears as the epigraph for a chapter titled, “The Festival of Roses”:Īnd the text of that chapter explains the reason why Stephens chose the rhyme to introduce the chapter:Īmong the first and the busiest were Mary Fuller and Isabel. The earliest appearance in English with solid evidence is from 1855 in Ann S. For we do have a version from Germany that is recorded in a 1796 collection of folklore: Unfortunately, Newell does not give any evidence to support his claim of a 1790 date, but the date is a plausible one, and there is no particular reason to doubt it. (Efforts to record folklore and culture of children did not begin in earnest until the nineteenth century.) In his 1883 Games and Songs of American Children, William Wells Newell claims this version was in use in New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1790: The earliest recorded versions date to the late eighteenth century but are likely older in oral use. While the flower-gathering tradition dates to the medieval era, the song itself is not nearly that old. Versions of the song, and they are myriad, are found in a number of European languages, and at the end the children usually either fall down, curtsy, or choose a sweetheart. The origin of the rhyme is rather straightforward the phrase comes from May Day or Whitsunday (Pentecost) traditions of dancing and gathering garlands or wreathes of flowers, traditions that date to the medieval era. Or at least that’s how the game is commonly played nowadays. Ring Around the Rosie (or Ring a Ring o’ Roses, or other variant spellings) is a children’s song and game where the children join hands, dance in a circle, sing, and at the end they all fall to the ground. ![]()
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