By: Tony Tekaroniake Evans
The popular nursery rhyme has long been linked to the plague. But folklorists say its history tells a different story.
A 1914 illustration by Jessie Willcox Smith shows children playing “Ring Around the Rosie.”
Nursery rhymes bring delight to children with their sing-song rhythms and fantastical imagery. But they can also be seen as codes for the darker aspects of history.
American children play "Ring Around the Rosie" in schoolyards as they have for generations, unaware that some have attributed the origin of the nursery rhyme to the Plague of London in 1665. Were these playful lines really a response to a bubonic plague that killed an estimated 100,000 people?
In the Middle Ages, the bubonic plague ravages Europe in one of the most deadly pandemics in human history.
An earlier plague, the Black Death of the 1340s may have killed up to half the population of Europe. Such disasters may have resonated across generations among largely illiterate populations, preserved in folklore, including nursery rhymes. The symbolism in the lines has encouraged such interpretations. As the lyrics go:
Ring around the rosie Pocket full of posies Ashes, ashes, We all fall down!
Proponents of the plague theory have suggested that the posies represent nosegays of herbs and flowers carried in hopes of warding off disease and that falling down represents death. Others have associated the ring with the danse macabre, , a medieval artistic tradition depicting figures, often holding hands, in a procession toward death. a medieval artistic tradition depicting the universality of death. However, folklorists have found no evidence connecting these elements of the rhyme to the plague. An earlier version of the rhyme from England goes:
Ring-a-ring o’ roses A pocketful of posies; A-tishoo! A-tishoo! We all fall down.
In this version, some see the “roses” as the red rashes that were symptomatic of the plague; “a-tishoo” as the sneezes and coughs that mark the fatal stage of the plague and "falling down" as dropping dead.
Folklorists, however, have largely rejected a direct link between the rhyme and the Black Death or Great Plague. Versions recorded in other countries contain different lyrics and often more optimistic themes, including romance and renewal.
Folklorist Stephen Winick, in a blog post for the Library of Congress, writes that this interpretation began only in the mid-20th century and notes the roughly 200-year gap between the Great Plague of 1665 and the first documented English versions of the rhyme. No evidence has emerged showing that the rhyme circulated during that period.
“Like most folklore items, this rhyme exists in many versions and variants,” writes Winick. “This allows us to ask whether the specific images associated with the plague occur in all or even most versions. It turns out they don’t. Many versions have no words that sound like sneezes, and many versions don’t mention falling down.”
Winick suggests that an erroneous interpretation of the nursery rhyme may have been taken up widely and passed down as “metafolklore”—folklore about folklore. Whether or not this classic nursery rhyme is tied to the Black Death, many now believe it is, simply because this storied connection has a certain ring to it.
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Tony Tekaroniake Evans is an award-winning journalist and the author of Teaching Native Pride, the memoir Believing in Indians and other books. He can be found at tonytekaroniakeevans.com.
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