The VERY Messed Up Origins of London Bridge | Nursery Rhymes Explained - Jon Solo

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#MessedUpOrigins #LondonBridge #JonSolo

[delilahdahlia]

I quite like hearing the origins of nursery rhymes, makes me realize how dark even the simplest things are

[adrian]

Anyone else used to play this during recess but have no clue how they learned this because no one taught them it?

[valenciaparchment]

Jon speaking about a nursery rhyme children's game: Once you find out the leading theory behind it, it's pretty much impossible to forget.
Jon: *Human Sacrifice*
Me: Boy that escalated quickly

[cheltoaster]

"London bridge is about human sacrifice.."
Ok that's cool.
Wow that explains why it was in black butler. Nice

[CrumpetCraig]

How to know if a nursery rhyme has messed up origins: it's british

[dontslappandas]

As a British person who used to play and sing this song I was always lead to believe it was because of the great fire you mentioned, and then the talk of rebuilding the bridge was talk of the best way to make it fire proof

[tyrant-den]

*"SIR, LONDON BRIDGE IS FALLING DOWN!"*
"Falling down!?"
"FALLING DOWN!"
"London bridge is falling down. My fair lady."

[itsmeyogkuv]

Nursery rhymes is just like real life. When your young you see the world and life all innocent and all but as you get older, you realize how the mess up the real world is.

[LucyLynette]

The version I heard (in a BBC documentary about London's bridges) was that Henry III's queen was put in charge of handling the revenues from the bridge, and instead of spending some portion of the income on maintenance, she was just spending it on herself and her own interests. She's the "fair lady" in question, and the song is from the perspective of the bridge's residents and merchants, begging her to spend some of the money on bridge repairs before another disaster struck.

[shadokittie]

I never heard the verses about building materials - we did have a verse that went “chop their heads off one by one, one by one. Chop their heads off one by one, my fair lady.... had heard the song had more to do with the Tower of London and public executions. Also, the River Thames is pronounced “Tems”, and “bow” is pronounced like as in “bow and arrows”, meaning “to bend”....

[AverytheCubanAmerican]

But according to the legendary Chicken Little, the bridge isn't falling down. It's the sky. I think we should listen to chickens, they're more trustworthy

[peytoncurtis]

When we play the game London Bridge is Falling Down the person who gets captured actually is the one who also switches spots with the one who caught them that's just some food for thought🤷‍♂️

[lunafromfandomland]

As someone who lives on Balkan, I feel obligated to tell you about Ivo Andric's novel "The Bridge on the Drina". This novel mostly describes life of people who lived around the bridge and how important the bridge was. The story starts in the time when Serbia and Bosnia were under Ottoman empire. One of the Empire sultans was actually born in Bosnia and he provided Bosnian people with this bridge. Why I'm telling you all this is because Ivo mentioned in his book how two twins had to be sealed inside the bridge so that the bridge won't fall down. Later he described those were just stories that people made up but still, the "human sacrifice" really reminded me of this.
Also, it's not the only case of people being sealed into bridges or other buldings in Serbian/Balkan folklore.
Just thougth it would be an interesting information :3

[brittanyschofield]

The London Bridge game is sometimes played with a different nursery rhyme ‘Oranges and Lemons’ and it is equally as creepy. But this could mean that the game itself had been played and that the rhyme was added later. Also English nurse rhymes are all messed up like there is alway a death or murder involved

[anabeth]

Dude, I literally told my sister about this series like five minutes ago

talk about coincidence

[Pattpeixinha]

In Portuguese:
"
-'Barqueiro
Bom barqueiro
Deixai-me passar
Carregada de filhinhos
Pra acabar de criar
-' Tu passarás, Passarás
Algum deles há-de ficar.
Se não for o da frente
Há de ser o de trás'"

"
-'Boatman
Good boatman,
Let me go through
I'm loaded with my little children
That I still need to raise.'
'You will pass. You will pass
One of you needs to stay
If not the one in the front
It will be the one behind' "

[jainabeard]

I remember playing/singing this in preschool and asking the teacher about it and she told us that it was actually about the original London collapsing and people trying to build it again. She said that the reason the other materials (wood, clay, steel, gold, etc) didn’t work was because the original bridge had a bunch of skeletons inside of it which made it stronger.

[dantematteo]

As someone from the UK, I was taught that London Bridge was referring to the Great Fire of London. Even the verses of the nursery rhyme referenced needing water to put the fire out and the chaos unleashing in the streets (rather than the materials required to rebuild the bridge, as suggested in this video). But now that I’ve started researching the version I grew up with, it seems that it never existed in the first place... Either this is one huge Mandela effect, or my childhood was a lie :(

[alaynamathias]

When you've watched black Butler and feel like an expert 👀

[misswaffies]

Growing up in Wales where I lived we used to sing "london bridge is burning down" or at least I did XD