Need Help with a Rhyme
Yesterday I finished Neil Gainman’s Stardust.
In the edition that I’ve got there’s also a prologue to Stardust; The Story of Wall.
It’s just a few pages but it’s about a girl who’s out on a field and sees a magpie land beside her. Then comes another one, and another one, and another one until there are seven of them.
It the book the girl remembers a rhyme that goes like this:
One for sorrow,
Two for joy,
Three for girls,
Four for boys,
Five for silver,
Six for gold,
Seven for a secret never to be told
As I read the rhyme I realised that that is also part of one of my favourite Counting Crows songs, A Murder of One. This got me thinking that they must’ve gotten the rhyme from somewhere and perhaps so did Gaiman, unless of course he actually wrote it himself, I find that somewhat unlikely though.
Since I can’t a find a good answer to this question on google (all I found there was people debating whether the rhyme went up to ten or not, something I seriously doubt the original rhyme does but that’s a different story) I’m now stretching out to you, my few, earnest readers in an attempt to clarify this. So the question is, who originally wrote this rhyme and how does it actually go?
