ro, a professor at Harvard argues that if indeed this rhyme was a memory of the Black Death of the 14th century or even a memory of the Plague in London in the 17th century that the rhyme had to go underground for one hundred to four hundred years with no one ever writing it down because there is no mention of this rhyme until 1881 withKate Greenaway's collection Mother Goose or the Old Nursery Rhymes. Her version of the rhyme is quite a bit different than the more popular version I quoted earlier. It goes like this:Ring-a-ring-a-rosies,A Pocket full of posies;Hush! Hush! Hush! Hush! We're all tumbled down.No one knows if Greenway doctored these old rhymes for her own purposes or if this is the true original rhyme, but it is the first time it was ever published (4). Phillip Hicock , an influential folklorist, agrees with Munro's ideas and is also skeptical that the rhyme refers to either of the plagues. He states that the facts clearly point to the second version of where the rhyme originated. He states in his column "Said and Done" in Folklore that:The more likely explanation is to be found in the religious ban on dancing among many Protestants in the nineteenth century, in Britain as well as here in North America. Adolescents found a way around the dancing ban with what was called in the United State the "Play-party." Play-parties consisted of ring games, which differed from square dances only in their name and their lack of musical accompaniment. They were hugely popular, and younger children got into the act, too. Some modern nursery games, particularly those, which involve rings of children, derive from these play-party games. "Little Sally Saucer" is one of them, and "Ring Around the Rosie" seems to be another(4).Folklore rarely appears from nowhere and Hiscock thinks that although "Ring Around the Rosie" originated from the ban on dancing, that parts could have been borrowed from a rhyme describing the plague, but that t...
