Words & Music
June 2013
Three Blind and Bleeding Mice
Inside the strange world of nursery rhymes
Three blind mice, three blind mice.
See how they run, see how they run.
They all ran after the farmer’s wife,
Who cut off their tails with a carving knife,
Did you ever see such a sight in your life,
As three blind mice?
For generations, nursery rhymes have delighted young imaginations with strange tales of fantastic happenings. Their simple melodies and repetitive lyrics are thought to aid early language and musical development, but their often surreal and sometimes violent subject matter has stirred controversy and debate about their appropriateness and meaning: Why are the three mice blind? What kind of a sadist would sever their tails with a kitchen knife? Who thought this would be suitable for kids?
The oldest historical records of children’s songs date back to Ancient Rome, but evidence of rhymes and lullabies have been found across all cultures and times. The earliest known English language rhymes were found scribbled into the margins of books from the Middle Ages, but it was not until 1744 that the first collection of nursery rhymes was published in England as Tommy Thumb’s Song Book. This popular tome contained many of the songs and rhymes we still sing today, such as Baby In The Treetop and London Bridge, both of which demonstrate an early preoccupation with danger and destruction.
Contemporary opinion about the significance of these lyrics varies greatly. For some theorists they are simply fantastical verse written to amuse new minds, while others hold that they are of far greater historical import than that. Three Blind Mice, they argue, is not just a song about a trio of rodents unlucky enough to lose their tails to a carving knife, but also a reference to three Protestant bishops executed by Queen Mary I of England in the 16th Century. Likewise, Baa, Baa, Black Sheep is at once a song about a sheep and also a veiled protest against medieval taxes on wool or even possibly an allusion to the slave trade.
By this reckoning, an apparently innocuous song like Ring Around The Rosie can take on a great historical significance. From 1883 comes this version:
A ring, a ring o’ roses
A pocket full o’ posies
A-tishoo, a-tishoo
We all fall down.
Here the references to sneezing and falling down may be taken as evidence of the song’s origins during the Great Plague. The ‘ring o’ roses’, it is argued, was a rosy rash symptomatic of the disease, while posies were used to mask its smell.
The idea of linking children’s rhymes to historical people and events has been traced back to one highly influential book called The Real Personages of Mother Goose by Katherine Elwes. Published in 1930, it asserted that nursery rhymes were in fact ‘codified historical narratives’ written at a time when to speak plainly would have been to risk one’s life. Unfortunately, it appears that in the cases of ‘Mice’, ‘Sheep’ and ‘Rosie’ neither the historical facts nor medical symptoms tally well with the theories put forward.
By the 19th Century, the popularity of nursery rhymes had spread from England to the New World, inspiring a host of original children’s songs such as Mary Had a Little Lamb. Sung to the simplest of melodies, the song’s prosaic subject matter signalled a shift away from the morbid scenarios of traditional rhymes like Humpty Dumpty and Jack and Jill. This trend toward sanitisation continued well into the modern era, by when public concern about the unsavoury and anachronistic nature of the old rhymes gave rise to the British ‘Society for Nursery Rhyme Reform’, who campaigned for a complete rewriting of the works.
Today, children sing the old rhymes with as much pleasure as their forebears did over 250 years ago. Psychologists attribute this enduring popularity, in part, to the gory subject matter and dreamlike logic of the rhymes. Like fairy tales, nursery rhymes are thought to provide a bridge between innocence and experience; a portal into a world populated by archetypes where children can imaginatively explore adult concepts and themes – a chance for kids to get their feet dirty and their hands a little bloody.
Phil Kakulas is a songwriter and teacher who plays double bass in The Blackeyed Susans.
Image: Paula Rego
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