Mention Mother Goose and a lot of people will picture a plump middle aged woman with glasses and a bonnet, who may or may not have a pet goose. Then again, Mother Goose has been depicted as a goose herself, or at least an anthropomorphic one. There's a fairly marked difference there.
But where does the character come from? There are a few different schools of thought on that. Likely it's not a straightforward story. Charles Perrault, a French author who brought us Sleeping Beauty and Little Red Riding Hood, among others, seems to have had something to do with it. The character was then revised in both the US and the UK. And has proven quite flexible.
2 comments:
That was a fascinating history of how the Mother Goose Tales came to be - makes a lot of sense too. The odd thing is that if you look at them on Project Gutenberg some are recognizable but there are many more little poems and stories that I never would have guessed existed and a lot of them make no sense whatever:
I'll tell you a story,
About John-a-Nory:
And now my story's begun.
I'll tell you another,
About Jack and his brother:
And now my story's done.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/39784/39784-h/39784-h.htm
My guess is that Charles Perrault had little to do with that one or this one either:
Daffy-down-Dilly has come up to town,
In a yellow petticoat and a green gown.
Maybe somewhere there was a real Mother Goose. I looked at a link at the bottom of the link where I found a short essay about a study made by an anthropologist and his team of a 2000 story repository of tales. Their examination showed that many of the stories may be up to 6000 years old.
https://www.science.org/content/article/some-fairy-tales-may-be-6000-years-old
There's also the oddly Beatlesque:
There was an old woman lived under the hill,
And if she's not gone she lives there still.
Baked apples she sold, and cranberry pies,
And she's the old woman that never told lies.
The John-a-Nory rhyme makes me chuckle. It's also known as Jack-a-Nory, and the British TV show Jackanory was named after it. Basically actors reading stories to children in the audience.
Similar fairytales are found in some pretty far-flung places and quite different languages, as the article points out. It would be a kick if some of them did go back 6,000 years, since that's well before the invention of the written word. Or at least any written word we know about. But then these are elemental stories, the kind of thing that people would talk about in an oral culture.
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