CSotD: And now he knows the REST of the poem!
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When yesterday's "Little Dog Lost" featured the tortoise reading the first verse of this poem to the tender-hearted dog, I thought to myself, if he's upset by that, it's a good thing nobody ever reads the rest of it.
And here we are.
Old Mother Hubbard is a very funny poem, but I can see why modern parents don't read the whole thing to their kids, because the dog not only dies and comes back to life but also smokes a pipe, while the old dame herself purchases wine and beer. Death we can handle, but that other stuff is off the table.
I speak, bitterly, from experience. Last year, I wrote a nine-part children's serial set during Prohibition, in which a young boy is initially intrigued by the easy money and flashy glitz of the bootleggers, but in the end realizes they are violent, dangerous criminals and accepts his uncle's viewpoint that, if you don't believe in a law, you change it — You don't just decide it doesn't apply to you.
Pretty positive message, I thought, in these days of drug use and gangster-worship, but a couple of papers, including one for which it was very local history, turned it down because it put the kid in the proximity of illegal liquor. He never drank in the story, but just the fact of the liquor meant the story couldn't run.
I take some comfort in knowing that the same paper had also declined to run a newspaper serial by Katherine Paterson ("Bridge to Terabithia," "Jacob I Have Loved," "The Great Gilly Hopkins," etc.) because, in "Field of the Dogs," the young protagonist at one point swipes his stepfather's shotgun to deal with some violent dogs.
Nothing happens, he realizes the error in his thinking, he reconciles with his stepfather and the local kids he was on the outs with. The boy changes for the better and is a fine lad for the experience, but, oh my goodness, you couldn't have a kid ever, even erroneously, thinking that violence solves problems.
By a quirk of timing, the chapter with the shotgun was scheduled to run in the Denver Post the week of the Columbine shootings. They were able to pull the story for the moment, but then continued the serial with that chapter the following week and were praised by teachers and parents for providing a kind of "safe haven" in which kids and adults could, in the wake of that horrific event, talk about violence and good choices and so forth.
The metaphors and distances of storytelling allow kids to ponder some of the really awful things they know about and think about but can't speak about, yet.
When you talk about grim stories for kids, people immediately add that second "M," but the Grimm Brothers were collecting folk stories, not children's stories. Children heard those tales around the fire, along with the rest of the community, and I suspect there was a conscious attempt to include them in the recital of values these stories represent. But children were not, in that age, seen as a separate community and the stories were for everyone, not just them.
A number of years ago, I collected and retold a collection of fables and folk stories from around the world, and, in collecting them, I wanted to include as many cultures and nations as possible. But I found that the stories of more developed nations were less violent and more nuanced than in the more primitive cultures, where a story might be as simple as a monkey insulting a crocodile and being killed for his folly.
I suppose that, in a community where monkeys and crocs are part of the daily landscape, there's no need for metaphor, but I couldn't find any moral in these stories beyond, "Don't insult people who might kill you." A valuable lesson around those fires but not as applicable to a broader audience.
That's not a universal divider between industrialized and pre-industrial people. I also edited a collection of Blackfoot, Cree and Chippewa stories that were quite nuanced and humorous. In fact, the original collector of those stories tells of listening with respect to the tales, as he thought fitting, only to be asked by the storyteller why he wasn't laughing and assured that it was not only appropriate but proper and expected.
By contrast to folk tales, however, the bulk of the Mother Goose poems were created specifically for children and sometimes by children.
Harsh poems with very direct moral lessons attached were often taught to kids, most famously by Heinrich Hoffman in the "Struwwelpeter" collection that includes "Little Suck-a-Thumb." Though published in 1845, I first encountered the poem in a collection of children's poetry that my father had as a child in the late 1920s, so the idea of raising well-behaved children by scaring the living shit out of them is not entirely ancient.
But I find that the bulk of Mother Goose poems are far more light-hearted in their approach, and if badly behaved children sometimes get some kind of comeuppance, it's rarely more than a spanking, like the one administered to Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son, who at least got a good meal out of the affair.
Not that all children's street rhymes avoid the grotesque. Some revel in it. In this example, however, you'll note that the villain is someone who harms a child, which in part softens it a bit. But it's not particularly soft at all, and I would be remiss if I didn't note that the blood and gore in this adult-sung version of the by-children-for-children song is actually somewhat toned down from other versions I've heard.
In any case, I don't know where Steve Boreman is taking this "Little Dog Lost" story arc, but it's bound to be worth tagging along.
And, as one more example of the sorts of things I've done in the field and in order to fill in any blanks in your poetic background, here's "Old Mother Hubbard" as I presented it some years ago, along with pics by classic illustrator Charles Robinson (and you'll thank me for that link).
You'll want to click on this to get a better look, but fergawdsake don't let the children see it.
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