Little King Boggen Lyrics
Walls of pie-crust, windows of pudding, a roof of pancakes. Little King Boggen built the house every hungry child dreams about.
Little King Boggen
Little King Boggen, he built a fine hall,
Pie-crust and pastry-crust, that was the wall;
The windows were made of black puddings and white,
And slated with pan-cakes,,you ne'er saw the like!
Printed from https://nurseryrhymes.co/little-king-boggen/
- Type
- Mother Goose
- Tune
- Spoken rhyme
- Best for ages
- 2 to 7 years
What Does Little King Boggen Mean?
The king's hall is made entirely of food. Black puddings and white puddings are two kinds of British sausage: black pudding is dark and rich, white pudding is pale and made with oats. Slated means roofed with slates, and the roof here is tiled with pancakes. "You ne'er saw the like" means you have never seen anything like it.
History and Origin
The rhyme is printed in The Real Mother Goose (1916), which collected many older English rhymes for American children. Houses made of food turn up in lots of stories, most famously the gingerbread house in Hansel and Gretel, which the Brothers Grimm published in 1812. Nobody knows who King Boggen was, and he may never have been anyone at all.
Learning Activities
- Build it: make a mini hall from crackers, cheese slices and a pancake roof, then eat it.
- Draw a food house: ask what your child would build a house from. Chocolate walls and jelly windows are popular choices.
- Word hunt: find the food words in the rhyme and talk about which ones your child has tasted.