Nursery Rhyme

"Sing a song of sixpence,

A pocketful of rye

Four-and-twenty blackbirds

Baked in a pie."

Nursery rhymes. Full of rhyme and rhythm and odd images. Not so full of sense.

"Rock-a-bye baby in the treetop

When the wind blows the cradle will rock

When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall

And down will come baby, cradle and all."

Nursery rhymes are a form of oral folklore and overlap with children's songs, lullabies and riddles. They may be connected to Parlor Games. Counting-out rhymes are a subgroup.

The English nursery rhymes specifically are connected with the name of Mother Goose, whence they are also called 'Mother Goose rhymes'. Mother Goose is an old folklore figure or stereotype -- an archetypal elderly country woman, who was originally interpreted as a teller, or mythical originator of fairy tales; but her focus shifted to nursery rhymes in the late 18th century. She also figures in a nursery rhyme herself, and is the subject of a traditional Pantomime. She is usually portrayed wearing a tall hat and shawl (the old Welsh peasant costume), except when she is an anthropomorpic goose.

Characters from nursery rhymes, like Old King Cole, Humpty Dumpty, or Mother Goose herself are Public Domain Characters that may feature in all kinds of works. The writer may try to explain their rhymes -- often enough, with a Parody origin.

"Hey-diddle-diddle, the cat and the fiddle

The cow jumped over the moon

The little dog laughed to see such a sight.

And the dish ran away with the spoon."

Modern hearsay lore often attributes macabre and horrifying "origin stories" to nursery rhymes; the most widespread possibly being that "Ring Around the Rosy" is a song about the plague. These assertions are Urban Legends. The origins of most nursery rhymes are simply not known, but it's quite obvious that most of them are nonsense rhymes that never made much sense.

Obviously, drawn upon for Ironic Nursery Tune. May also feature in a Fractured Fairy Tale.

Comic Books

 * Several nursey rhyme characters appear in Fables and even more in the spinoff Jack Of Fables.
 * DC Comics supervillain Solomon Grundy is named after a nursery rhyme; "Solomon Grundy, born on a Monday..."

Fairy Tales

 * In "Maid Maleen", the tower inspired children to sing a nursery rhyme as they passed it.

Literature

 * In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, Alice meets up with Humpty Dumpty himself and Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Resulting in her being quite Genre Savvy: she knows that the king has promised to send all his horses and men to help Humpty Dumpty, and she awaits the crow with great anticipation, to break up the fight.
 * JRR Tolkien wrote several "expanded" versions of nursery rhymes, filling in background to make them "reasonable". He attributed them to Bilbo and put one -- from "Hey diddle diddle" -- in Frodo's mouth in the The Lord of the Rings.
 * His rendition of "Hey, diddle diddle" is, in fact, a drinking song. The musical does a rendition of it.
 * Jack Spratt of Jasper Fforde's Nursery Crime books is himself a nursery rhyme figure and runs across several others. (Though his ambit includes Fairy Tales as well.)
 * Mrs. Wren in John C Wright's Chronicles of Chaos makes use of rhymes as enchantments. Taffy ap Cyrmu, in the same work, takes his name from one: "Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief."
 * In Neil Gaiman's Stardust, nursery rhymes contain great secrets. One character jeers at the way ordinary people recite them to babies.
 * Neil Gaiman's short story "The Case of the Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds" humorously places Mother Goose characters in a parody of crime noir, as "Little" Jack Horner, private eye, attempts to solve the murder of Humpty Dumpty.
 * In Diana Wynne Jones's Deep Secret, one of the Deep Secrets of the title is hidden in a nursery rhyme, and the hero has to interpret it in order to save the Love Interest's life.
 * Agatha Christie titled several novels after nursery rhymes. In A Pocket Full of Rye, and more famously And Then There Were None, victims are murdered in the manner of a nursery rhyme.
 * In Devon Monk's Allie Beckstrom novel Magic to the Bone, Allie uses "Miss Mary Mack" as her mantra

Live Action Television

 * In the Doctor Who serial Frontier in Space, Jo prevents her hypnosis by reciting nursery rhymes.

Newspaper Comics

 * In Frank and Ernest, when dealing with Fairy Tale characters, such figures as Little Bo-Peep also appear.
 * And Mother Goose and Grimm does it too, naturally.
 * Mutts has a book club; a goose, one reader, resorts to nursery rhymes quite often.

Theatre

 * Mother Goose often features in Pantomime, albeit as a real woman (honest) who has had children and happens to own a very large goose.

Video Games

 * Thief: Deadly Shadows contains several nursery rhymes, all of them rather disturbing (and accurate foreshadowing).
 * Dead Space has the very very very creepy singing of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in it.
 * Mixed-Up Mother Goose, a 1987 Sierra game in which the all the characters have lost their items, and you have to go through the game reuniting them.

Webcomics

 * In Sinfest,
 * Slick compares himself to Old Mother Hubbard.
 * Fuchsia, to the damned.
 * In Erstwhile, Maid Maleen ends with peasant girls singing such a verse, inspired by her tale.