As I Was Going to St Ives

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As I Was Going to St Ives is one of the most famous English nursery rhymes . It represents a riddle poem . The text reads (with the following free translation):

As I was going to St Ives
I met a man with seven wives

Each wife had seven sacks
Each sack had seven cats
Each cat had seven kits

Kits, cats, sacks, wives
How many were going to St Ives?

I went to St. Ives at dawn
and met a man with seven women.

Each woman carried seven sacks, with
seven cats piggybacking in them.
Each cat has seven kittens.

Kittens, cats, sacks, women,
how many went to St. Ives at dawn?

The rhyme only appears to be a mathematical riddle , for only the speaker went to St. Ives ; He met man, women, sacks and cats on the way there. It remains unclear what the aim of this group is. It is commonly assumed that she is walking towards the speaker or is not moving toward St. Ives or the opposite direction. The speaker encounters a man, seven women, 49 sacks and an unlikely 343 cats and 2401 kittens, for a total of 2801 people, animals and textiles. With the speaker, the total is 2,802.

In the movie Die Hard: Now all the more , the rhyme is presented as a riddle and thus known to a broad public in the German-speaking world.

The rhyme was first proven around 1730, but a similar mathematical problem already appeared in the ancient Egyptian Rhind papyrus (around 1650 BC).

literature

  • CB Williams: As I Was Going to St Ives . In: Folklore 86: 2, 1975. pp. 133-135.