Week 12 Reading Diary: Nursery Rhymes

This week, since I had so much fun playing around with word use last week, I chose to read nursery rhymes! The rhymes are originally from The Nursery Rhyme Book edited by Andrew Lang.

I was initially surprised to find that many of the nursery rhymes that I was familiar with actually have much more to them! For example, the first reference to "the man in the moon" had nothing to do with a dish running away with a spoon!

Many of the tales in particular had dark endings or subjects. I think these would scare me more as a child than anything! Of course, I knew that some of them might have this tone because of "Ring Around the Rosy" being about the plague; however, I still expected it to be somewhat hidden! Ones like "Three Blind Mice" are more discreet. That one is about Queen Mary I putting to death three noblemen.

I particularly enjoyed searching for the context of the games like Oranges and Lemons. So many of the place names mentioned wouldn't make sense to someone who was unfamiliar with the area of origin.

I think it could be fun to try and turn other familiar games from my childhood into rhymes like these!

Three Blind Mice: a rhyme with a dark hidden meaning!
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