Ring a Ring o' Roses

Lyrics

It is unknown what the earliest version of the rhyme was or when it began. Many incarnations of the game have a group of children form a ring, dance in a circle around a person, and stoop or curtsy with the final line. The slowest child to do so is faced with a penalty or becomes the "rosie" (literally: rose tree) from the French rosier) and takes their place in the center of the ring.

Variations, corruptions, and vulgarized versions were noted to be in use long before the earliest printed publications. One such variation was dated to be in use in Connecticut in the 1840s.

Common British versions include:

Common American versions include:

The last two lines are sometimes varied to:

Early attestation

The first printing of the rhyme was in Kate Greenaway's 1881 edition of Mother Goose; or, the Old Nursery Rhymes:

A novel of 1855, The Old Homestead by Ann S. Stephens, describes children playing "Ring, ring a rosy" in New York. William Wells Newell reports two versions in America a short time later (1883) and says that another was known in New Bedford, Massachusetts around 1790:

There are versions from Shropshire, collected in 1883, and a manuscript of rhymes collected in Lancashire at the same period gives three closely related versions, with the now familiar sneezing, for instance:

In 1892, folklorist Alice Gomme could give twelve versions.

Other languages

A German rhyme first printed in 1796 closely resembles "Ring a ring o'roses" in its first stanza and accompanies the same actions (with sitting rather than falling as the concluding action):

Loosely translated this says "Ringed, ringed row. We are three children, sitting under an elder bush. All of us going hush, hush, hush!" The rhyme is well known in Germany with the first line "Ringel, Ringel, Reihe" (as the popular collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn gave it); it has many local variants, often with "Husch, husch, husch" (which in German could mean "quick, quick") in the fourth line, comparable to the "Hush! hush! hush! hush!" of the first printed English version. This popular variant is notable:

The translation is "A ring, a ring of roses. Beautiful apricots. Blue violets, forget-me-nots. All children sit down."

Swiss versions have the children dancing round a rosebush. Other European singing games with a strong resemblance include "Roze, roze, meie" ("Rose, rose, May") from The Netherlands with a similar tune to "Ring a ring o' roses" and "Gira, gira rosa" ("Circle, circle, rose"), recorded in Venice in 1874, in which girls danced around the girl in the middle who skipped and curtsied as demanded by the verses and at the end kissed the one she liked best, so choosing her for the middle.

In Croatian/Serbian/Bosnian language, there is a similar rhyme called "Ringe Ringe Raja":

A rough translation is "Ringe Ringe Raya (doesn't mean anything, this is common in Croato-Serbian rhymes), uncle Ducky has came, and he ate all the eggs, one egg crashed, and we children DUCK!" On the last word, the children singing the rhyme jump or duck.

Meaning

The origins and meanings of the game have long been unknown and subject to speculation. In 1898, A Dictionary of British Folklore contained the belief that an explanation of the game was of pagan origin, based on the Sheffield Glossary comparison of Jacob Grimm's Deutsche Mythologie. The theory states that it is in reference to Pagan myths and cited a passage which states, "Gifted children of fortune have the power to laugh roses, as Treyja wept gold." Believing the first instance to be indicative of Pagan beings of light. Another suggestion is more literal, that it was making a "ring" around the roses and bowing with the all "fall down" as a curtsy. In 1892, the American writer, Eugene Field wrote a poem titled Teeny-Weeny that specifically referred to fey folk playing ring-a-rosie. According to Games and Songs of American Children, published in 1883, the "rosie" was a reference to the French word for rose tree and the children would dance and stoop to the person in the center. Variations, especially more literal ones, were identified and noted with the literal falling down that would sever the connections to the game-rhyme. Addy's interpretation failed to account for the sneezing, which had not carried over to the United States and was losing ground in Britain, as another instance of the Pagan influence. Again in 1898, sneezing was then noted to be indicative of many superstitious and supernatural beliefs across differing cultures.

Since the 20th century, the rhyme has often been associated with the Great Plague which happened in England in 1665, or with earlier outbreaks of the Black Death in England. Interpreters of the rhyme before the Second World War make no mention of this; by 1951, however, it seems to have become well established as an explanation for the form of the rhyme that had become standard in the United Kingdom. Peter and Iona Opie, the leading authorities on nursery rhymes, remarked:

The invariable sneezing and falling down in modern English versions have given would-be origin finders the opportunity to say that the rhyme dates back to the Great Plague. A rosy rash, they allege, was a symptom of the plague, and posies of herbs were carried as protection and to ward off the smell of the disease. Sneezing or coughing was a final fatal symptom, and "all fall down" was exactly what happened.

The line Ashes, Ashes in colonial versions of the rhyme is claimed to refer variously to cremation of the bodies, the burning of victims' houses, or blackening of their skin, and the theory has been adapted to be applied to other versions of the rhyme. In its various forms, the interpretation has entered into popular culture and has been used elsewhere to make oblique reference to the plague.

Folklore scholars regard the theory as baseless for several reasons: