Lullabies are the beginning of all poetry, in the life of each individual and probably also in the history of mankind. It seems obvious, that the poets of the first epic poems and the first hymns were rocked and lulled to sleep by their mothers. According to Desmond Morris, the author of The naked ape (1967), we got acquainted to the soothing rhythm of rocking before our birth: it repeats the rhythm of the heart beat we heard in the womb (Morris 1967). So, one could say, our first literary activities have a biological background.

My interest for the genre was started by an episode of the tv-series The human animal, based on the The naked ape, in which Morris showed how different the treatment of newbom babies is in different parts of the world. But when a baby starts to cry, the reaction is the same everywhere: it is picked up and rocked in the arms, accompanied with a soothing humming or singing.

Recently, I have been collecting lullabies from oral traditions all over the world. At this moment I have only 59 songs from 13 countries or regions (not counting the Netherlands and Germany). But even this relatively small corpus already contains examples of a fascinating change and renewal. The elementary forms of the genre are universal. More elaborated songs reflect cultural differences, of course; still they also contain common elements, even in different continents.

I will try to enlarge my collection substantially before the conference, by going through a hundred new sources from all over the world, to be able to make some more profound observations. I will illustrate my paper with many examples, always in the original language with an English translation.

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