Curiously, the lullaby’s driving force of love and sensitivity, combined with the practicality of settling down an exhausted baby is often masked by eerie, austere, or outright frightening themes. A lullaby is often a façade for a mother’s expression of goals, expectations, or even warnings for her child, which she is able to express in private, with only her unaware baby listening.
To a child, a lullaby might be a simple cradlesong, but to a mother, a lullaby can be an emotional song of anger, stress, or terror. With many examples of unusually fearsome lyrics mixed with sweet melodies, there is a common clash of sensitivity and love with fear and sadness in lullabies. Lullabies are one of the most intimate allusions to a culture, hinting at the bittersweet world a child will soon grow to know. Through a gentle tune, a mother pacifies her child into slumber with a subtle warning of the future.
The word “lullaby” in English can be broken into two parts: “lull” and “aby.” Etymologically speaking, the word “lulling,” meaning to hush to sleep, most likely gets its name from similar Swedish, German, Sanskrit, and Dutch words. The German and Sanskrit words “lullen” and “lolati” mean “to rock” and “to move to and fro,” while the Dutch and Swedish words “lollen” and “lulla” mean to “hum a lullaby” or “to mutter.” Lullabies often include humming, muttering, and rocking; therefore, the Swedish, German, Sanskrit, and Dutch word definitions combine appropriately to form the English word “lull.” The second half of “lullaby”—“aby”—may be taken from “good bye” or “bye bye,” by means of the mother saying “bye bye” to her children at night when they fall asleep. Similar to “lullaby,” the German term “Wiegenlied” takes its root from “wiegen,” meaning to rock, to sway, to cradle, or to nurse. The French equivalent of the term, “berceuse,” comes from “bercer,” meaning “to rock,” while the Spanish term “cancíon de cuna,” translates to “cradle song.”