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Mother Goose


n.

The imaginary author of Mother Goose's Tales, a collection of nursery rhymes first published in London in the 18th century.


 
 
Music Encyclopedia: Mother Goose.

Suite by Ravel after fairy-tales by Péricault (1910); originally for two pianos, it was orchestrated in 1911.



 

Fictitious old woman, reputedly the source of the body of traditional children's songs and verses known as nursery rhymes. Often pictured as a beak-nosed, sharp-chinned old woman riding on the back of a flying gander, she was first associated with nursery rhymes in Mother Goose's Melody (1781), published by the successors of John Newbery. The name apparently derived from the title of Charles Perrault's collection of fairy tales Ma Mère l'oye (1697; "My Mother Goose"). The persistent rumour that Mother Goose was an actual Boston woman is false.

For more information on Mother Goose, visit Britannica.com.

 
English Folklore: Mother Goose

In mid-17th-century France, the phrase contes de ma mère l'oye meant ‘fairytales’, and in 1697 it appeared on the frontispiece of Charles Perrault's Contes du Temps Passé; when these were printed in English from 1729 onwards, they were entitled Mother Goose's Tales. Later (probably in 1765) the publisher John Newbery produced a collection of traditional nursery rhymes, Mother Goose's Melody, which became so popular that for the next two generations all such rhymes were called ‘Mother Goose songs’, as they still are in the USA.

A pantomime of 1806 created a tale in which Old Mother Goose is a kindly witch, owning a gander on which she can fly, and a goose that lays golden eggs; soon chapbooks elaborated the story, adding a stupid son named Jack, who unwittingly buys the magic goose. This became popular in Victorian children's books, especially in a rhymed version of 1820.

Bibliography
The full bibliography list is available here.

  • Opie and Opie, 1951: 30-42, and 1955: 88-90
  • Ryoji Tsurumi, Folklore 101 (1990), 28-35
 
Fairy Tale Companion: Mother Goose

Mother Goose, legendary female figure often associated with fairy tales. Some scholars believe her origins may lie in the stories and representations of Queen Blanche (d. 783), the mother of Charlemagne, called ‘La Reine Pédauque’ for her large, flat, goose‐like foot. Others have connected her with the Queen of Sheba (also sometimes represented with a webbed foot or a mermaid's tail), or with the classical sibyls, or with St Anne, the good, wise grandmother of the child Jesus. All of these figures are ambiguously associated with story‐telling, spinning, and female, sometimes bawdy mystery.

Whatever her origins, Mother Goose was certainly linked with fairy tales in France. They were often referred to as ‘contes de ma Mère l'Oie’ (in a letter Mme de Sévigné wrote her daughter in 1674, for example); Charles Perrault used the phrase as the subtitle of his 1697 collection Histoires et contes du temps passé (Stories and Tales of Times Past). On the frontispiece three children, under a placard bearing the subtitle, listen to a nurse with a distaff—a representation of the motherly, lower‐class storytellers Mother Goose, Mother Bunch, Gammer Grethel, Fru Gosen, and all the other ‘old wives’ and gossips.

In England and America, however, Mother Goose became the icon of nursery rhymes during the 18th century, probably following John Newbery's publication of Mother Goose's Melody, or Sonnets for the Cradle (c.1765). (The old story that she was a Mrs Elizabeth Goose of Boston has been discredited; no copy of the collection of rhymes bearing her name supposedly published in 1719 has ever been found.) Mother Goose continues to be illustrated, usually as a large goose with an apron or bonnet and spectacles, in endless collections of verses for children and is also still a popular drag role in British pantomime.

Bibliography

  • Opie, Iona and Peter (eds.), The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (1951).
  • Warner, Marina, From the Beast to the Blonde (1994).

— Elizabeth Wanning Harries

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Mother Goose,
name associated with nursery rhymes. Most English nursery rhymes have been ascribed to Mother Goose. The origin of the name is still a matter of dispute. Some trace it to a French collection of tales by Charles Perrault (1697) that had the subtitle Contes de ma mère L'Oye [tales of mother goose]. This name has in turn been traced to Queen Goosefoot, Charlemagne's mother (see Bertrada), who was a patron of children. Others claim an American origin in Mother Goose's Melodies, published 1719 in Boston by Thomas Fleet, whose mother-in-law was said to be Elizabeth Vergoose. A collection of Mother Goose rhymes was published by John Newbery in London in 1765. The subject matter of the rhymes has been linked by some scholars to actual events in English political history.

Bibliography

See The Annotated Mother Goose, ed. by W. S. and C. Baring-Gould (1970); study by S. K. Abbey (1967).


 
Quotes By: Mother Goose

Quotes:

"For every ailment under the sun, There is a remedy, or there is none, If there be one, try to find it; If there be none, never mind it."

 
Wikipedia: Mother Goose
A page from a late 17th century handwritten and illustrated version of Charles Perrault's Contes de ma mère l'Oye,  depicting Puss in Boots
Enlarge
A page from a late 17th century handwritten and illustrated version of Charles Perrault's Contes de ma mère l'Oye, depicting Puss in Boots


Mother Goose is a well-known figure in the literature of fairy tales and nursery rhymes. Mother Goose is best known in the United States; in the United Kingdom and other English speaking nations the designation "nursery rhymes" is more common.[1]. Most people in the UK now only know Mother Goose as a title for a Christmas pantomime - the tales have formed the basis for many classic British pantomimes, including one called "Mother Goose".

Who was Mother Goose?

Mother Goose is the name given to an archetypical country woman, who is supposedly the originator of the Mother Goose stories and rhymes. Yet no specific writer has ever been identified with such a name, of which the first known mention appears in an aside in a versified chronicle of weekly happenings that appeared regularly for several years, Jean Loret's La Muse Historique (in 1660). His remark, ...comme un conte de la Mere Oye ("...like a Mother Goose story") shows that the term was already familiar.

There are reports, familiar to tourists to Boston, Massachusetts that the original Mother Goose was a Bostonian named Mary Goose who is interred at the Granary Burying Ground. According to Eleanor Early, a Boston travel and history writer of the 1930s and 40s, the original Mother Goose was a real person who lived in Boston in the 1660s. She was reportedly the second wife of Isaac Goose, who brought to the marriage ten children of her own to add to Isaac's ten. After Isaac died, Elizabeth went to live with her eldest daughter, who had married Thomas Fleet, a publisher who lived on Pudding Lane (now Devonshire Street). According to Early, "Mother Goose" used to sing songs and ditties to her grandchildren all day, and other children swarmed to hear them. Finally, her son-in-law gathered her jingles together and printed them.[2]

In The Real Personages of Mother Goose (1930), Katherine Elwes Thomas submits that the image and name "Mother Goose", or "Mere L'Oye", may be based upon ancient legends of the wife of King Robert II of France. "Goose-Footed Bertha" is often referred in French legends as spinning incredible tales that enraptured children. The world authority on the Mother Goose tradition, Iona Opie, does not give any credence to either the Elwes Thomas or the Boston suppositions.

The initiator of the literary fairy tale genre, Charles Perrault, published in 1695 under the name of his son a collection of fairy tales Histoires ou contes du temps passés, avec des moralités, which grew better known under its subtitle, "Contes de ma mère l'Oye" or "Tales of my Mother Goose". Perrault's publication marks the first authenticated starting-point for Mother Goose stories.

In 1729 there appeared an English translation of Perrault's collection, Robert Samber's Histories or Tales of Past Times, Told by Mother Goose. John Newbery published a compilation of English rhymes, Mother Goose's Melody, or, Sonnets for the Cradle (London, undated, c.1765), which switched the focus from fairy tales to nursery rhymes, and in English this was the prime connotation for Mother Goose until recently.

The first public appearance of the Mother Goose stories in the New World was in Worcester, Massachusetts, where printer Isaiah Thomas reprinted Samber's volume under the same title, in 1786.[3]

Maurice Ravel wrote Ma Mère l'Oye, a suite for the piano, which he then orchestrated for a ballet.

Other examples


  • "Mother Goose" is also the nickname of a character of the movie Mad Max (George Miller, 1979), Jim Goose.
  • Tales of Brother Goose by Brett Nicholas Moore, a book published in 2006, satirizes Mother Goose stories with modern dialogue and cynical humor.
  • eNursery Rhymes by Mother Mouse, a book published in 2006, recasts the traditional Mother Goose rhymes for children of the computer age.
  • "Mother Goose" was once told as a moral teaching story to small children in Africa.
American advertisement; premium was Baum's book, 1900
Enlarge
American advertisement; premium was Baum's book, 1900

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Margaret Lima Norgaard, "Mother Goose", Encyclopedia Americana 1987; see, for instance, Peter and Iona Opie, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (1951) 1989.
  2. ^ Reader's Digest April 1939 Pg 28.
  3. ^ Charles Francis Potter, "Mother Goose", Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legends II ( 1950) p 751f.

External links


 
 

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Copyrights:

Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
Music Encyclopedia. The Concise Grove Dictionary of Music. Copyright © 1994 by Oxford University Press, Inc.. All rights reserved.  Read more
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
English Folklore. A Dictionary of English Folklore. Copyright © 2000, 2003 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
Fairy Tale Companion. The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales. Copyright © 2000, 2002, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/  Read more
Quotes By. Copyright © 2008 QuotationsBook.com. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Mother Goose" Read more

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