Neil Gaiman Replies

Horse-Drawn Hearse

(Image Borrowed from the Past)

I am still wondering about the origin of that epigraph used by Neil Gaiman for The Graveyard Book. Just to refresh our memories, here is that brief rhyme:

Rattle his bones
Over the stones
It's only a pauper
Who nobody owns

Gaiman cites it as a "Traditional Nursery Rhyme," but I've found nothing yet to substantiate that.

Because I'm obsessive, I decided to go to the source and therefore sent a query to Mr. Gaiman himself:

Dear Mr. Neil Gaiman

Sorry to bother you with an inane question, but about this:

Rattle his bones
Over the stones
It's only a pauper
Who nobody owns

Is this really a "Traditional Nursery Rhyme"? I ask because . . . I'm a bit obsessive. I have already done some digging around:

Gaiman's Borrowed Rhyme

James Joyce et al.: "Rattle his bones"

I found no nursery rhyme, however. Don't bother to reply unless this strikes your fancy. I understand that people are pressed for time.

Anyway, I'm enjoying your stories, which I've only recently learned about -- and through a review of the movie Coraline in Christianity Today, of all places. Now, I'm reading everything that you've written. Well . . . everything published that I can find.

Best Regards,

Jeffery Hodges

To my surprise, Mr. Gaiman replied within a couple of hours to my query about this rhyme:

The first reference I found to it was in a book on Death Customs in England, which referred to it as a trad nursery rhyme and had it in the form I listed in the book.

When we were copyediting, we wondered about the grammer on who and whom and that, and then I found myself spending a week on the internet doing exactly the journey you did, and coming to similar conclusions. But liking the version I'd read first the best, and liking the idea that it was a nursery rhyme the best -- and really not knowing if the poem was echoing something older or not. So I left it...

Thank you, Mr. Gaiman, for taking the time to provide this helpful explanation.

Of course, I now have a new obsession. I cannot find a reference online to Death Customs in England. I did find The Victorian Undertaker (1996), by Trevor May, which has a version of the rhyme on page 11 (and a lugubrious photo of a pauper's hearse on the following page):

Rattle his bones over the stones;
He's only a pauper, whom nobody owns

Mr. May identifies this as "the refrain of a widely sung song, 'The Pauper's Drive', set to music 1839" (oddly enough, for the poem was published in 1841 by Thomas Noel in his book of poetry Rymes and Roundelayes).

I also found a similar book, Death, Dissection, and the Destitute (2001), by Ruth Richardson, and it has a version of the rhyme on page 375 that is closer to the one used by Gaiman:

Rattle his bones over the stones,
It's only a pauper whom nobody owns

Ms. Richardson cites Thomas Noel's poem and notes that it "has the well-known refrain" that I've just quoted, helpfully adding that "'owns' is another word for 'claims' in this context."

Interestingly, in Answers.com's entry on "funeral" (and seemingly only there), I found a note on the "pauper's funeral," in which "a cheap coffin [was] pushed on a hand-cart, as remembered in the children's rhyme":

Rattle his bones over the stones,
He's only a pauper whom nobody owns.

This couplet is attributed by Answers.com to Thomas Noel, citing "The Pauper's Drive," but note that the writer has also referred to the lines as a "children's rhyme," which returns us to a point close to Gaiman's original identification of the lines as a "Traditional Nursery Rhyme."

Perhaps this is as far as we can go, but since we now have Mr. Neil Gaiman's own words on the subject, we need not go further anyway.

PS: Since the time this post was written, I've published my own dark fantasy story, partly inspired by Gaiman . . .