SOLVED: The Shocking Crime At The Heart Of One Of England's Most Famous Nursery Rhymes
This is longer than you might first expect.
Little Bo Peep lost her sheep,
And something something something.
I woke up today with this banging around my head and eventually found myself wondering, who is this Little Bo Peep, and what exactly happened with these sheep?
So to Google I went and found the rest of the first stanza:
Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep
And doesn’t know where to find them
Leave them alone, and they’ll come home
Wagging their tails behind them.
This is the one I had heard at some point and forgotten half of. It is not really a story. It is a “don’t sweat the small things” statement of folk pastoral wisdom. A nursery-rhyme version of “calm down, it’ll work itself out.”
The name of this Substack is CALM DOWN, so I briefly thought, nice, maybe I should write a post about what we can learn from Little Bo Peep. But we strive for accuracy here at Calm Down. We do not simply launder our priors through a nursery rhyme. read. We interrogate our own biases. We put in the work.
Friends, there are more stanzas.
And these stanzas are a bombshell.
Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep
And doesn’t know where to find them
Leave them alone, and they’ll come home
Wagging their tails behind them.
Little Bo-peep fell fast asleep,
And dreamt she heard them bleating;
But when she awoke, she found it a joke,
For they were still all fleeting.
Then up she took her little crook,
Determined for to find them;
She found them indeed, but it made her heart bleed,
For they’d left their tails behind them.
It happened one day, as Bo-Peep did stray
Into a meadow hard by,
There she espied their tails side by side,
All hung on a tree to dry.
She heaved a sigh, and wiped her eye,
And over the hillocks went rambling,
And tried what she could, as a shepherdess should,
To tack each again to its lambkin.
So, in plain English, here is the beat-by-beat saga:
Bo Peep is in charge of some sheep. The sheep flee. She is worried about it. Someone tells her to chill out, they’ll come back, and she takes a nap. While asleep, she dreams of the sheep bleating. She wakes up hoping they’re home, but they are still missing. So she finally goes looking for them and finds them.
But their tails are gone!
Someone—or something—took their tails.
She eventually finds the tails hanging on a tree to dry.
She then loses her mind and tries to sew the tails back onto the sheep.
This is not folk wisdom.
This is a crime scene.
Someone mutilated these fucking sheep.
Detective Ben Is On The Case.
Now, I know what some of you are thinking. “What about the tenses, Ben? The first stanza is in the present tense and the later ones are in the past tense. That suggests the first stanza is a narrator imparting a moral lesson and the later stanzas are the underlying story.”
My response is: go back to patrol, officer. You are not ready for the detective squad.
Even in the tense-change reading, the story does not resolve cleanly. The sheep are already gone before Bo Peep falls asleep, because when she wakes up they are “still all fleeting.” Which means the first stanza is not some reliable summary of what is about to happen. And in any case, if you knew how this ended, you would never say, “Leave them alone, and they’ll come home, wagging their tails behind them,” because that is not what happens. Their tails are hanging from a tree.
So let us proceed like adults.
Why is Little Bo Peep in charge of these sheep at all?
She is the least capable member of the Peep household. Everyone else is off doing harder jobs. The father is doing father stuff. The mother is doing mother stuff. The older boys are threshing or hauling or suffering in some authentic old-timey way. Little Bo Peep got the lowest-stakes assignment available: just keep an eye on the sheep. Do not lose the sheep. That’s it. This is not the family choosing their best and brightest for a crucial mission. This is rural task triage. They gave the dumb kid the sheep.
This is not a fun little whoopsie-daisy for the Peep family.
A herd of sheep for these people was a big deal. You got wool from them, for one thing. Eventually, you ate some of them. These were assets. Losing the flock is not some cutesy-tootsy thing. It is a meaningful economic screw-up. If Bo Peep loses these sheep for real, she has not merely embarrassed herself. The Peep family is done.
What is going on with the tails?
The conventional explanation, according to wikipedia, is that the rhyme is alluding to docking sheep tails—aka farmers snipping their own sheep’s tails for various boring reasons. This is a real husbandry practice. Fine. I have heard this explanation. I reject it as a full explanation of the story. Because if docking is the answer, then the tails have no independent significance inside the plot. They’re just waste. But in the rhyme, the tails are hung on a tree to dry.
So, the tails have independent value.
You do not hang worthless trash on a tree to dry for no reason. That is not random. That is processing. That is preservation. That is someone saying, “I intend to do something with these later.”
So: why would someone steal sheep tails?
On initial googling, there was no immediately satisfying answer, which is when ChatGPT, in a moment of weakness and machine cowardice, informed me I was being “overly literal.” This is why the AIs are not ready to defeat us in matches of wit and war.
