Solomon Grundy

History & Origin

"Solomon Grundy" was first published in 1842 in James Orchard Halliwell's collection "The Nursery Rhymes of England", and remains one of the most unusual rhymes in the canon. In eight lines, it compresses an entire life — birth, baptism, marriage, illness, death, and burial — into the seven days of a single week, with Sunday left free for burial.

The rhyme is dark but not melodramatic. It states the facts of Solomon Grundy's life in a completely matter-of-fact tone: he was born, he was christened, he married, he fell ill, he died. The compression of a lifetime into a week gives the verse its particular quality — not grief, exactly, but a certain wry acknowledgement that lives are shorter than they feel, and that the shape of a life can be summarised very briefly.

The name Solomon Grundy may be derived from "salmagundi", a dish of chopped meat and vegetables common in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, used as a synonym for a miscellaneous collection. In this sense the name is a comic invention, a made-up everyman.

The rhyme has given its name to a DC Comics supervillain — a zombie named Solomon Grundy — which suggests that its atmosphere of dark brevity translates well into different contexts. In the nursery, it teaches the days of the week; in the imagination, it does something more unsettling.