Red Sky at Morning

DESCRIPTION: "Red sky at morning, Sailors take warning, Red sky at night, Sailor's delight." The order of the lines may change, and it may be a shepherd or skipper or other occupation rather than a sailor.
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE:
KEYWORDS: sailor warning nonballad | weather forecasting
FOUND IN: US(MW,SE) Ireland
REFERENCES (6 citations):
Kane-SongsAndSayingsOfAnUlsterChildhood, p. 136, "Red sky at night, sailor's delight" (1 text)
Baring-Gould-AnnotatedMotherGoose #446, p. 206, "(Rainbow i' the morning)"
Jack-PopGoesTheWeasel, pp. 170-171, "Red Sky at Night" (1 text)
NorthCarolinaFolkloreJournal, Wayland D. Hand, "North Carolina Folk Beliefs and Superstitions Collected in California" Vol. XVIII, No. 3 (Nov 1970), p. 122 [#122-123], "Rainbow in the morning/Red sky at morning" (1 text)
MidwestFolklore, W. L. McAtee, "Some Folklore of Grant County, Indiana, in the Nineties," Volume 1, Number 4 (WInter 1951), p. 266, "(Rainbow in the morning)" (1 text)
MidwestFolklore, David D. Anderson, "Songs and Sayings of the Lakes," Volume 12, Number 1 (Spring 1962) p. 5, "(Red sun at night, sailor's delight)" (1 text)
Roud #25780
NOTES [419 words]: This is so well-known that even my mother learned it when young (presumably in Michigan in the 1940s), but it is usually a proverb, not a song. Since it has a Roud number, though, I'm indexing it.
Because it's so widespread, the list of citations here is surely incomplete. I did not index it until the Ballad Index was very far advanced.
I've seen many explanations for how sailors or shepherds or whoever came to speak these verses, but I've always thought them ultimately derived from Matthew 16:2-3 (partial parallel in Luke 12:54-56, which also refers to the Signs of the Times but not to the sky being red). The King James version reads,
[2] He answered and said unto them, When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather: for the sky is red. [3] And in the morning, It will be foul weather to day: for the sky is red and lowering. O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?
Oddly enough, these words are very likely an insertion into the New Testament (could it be that the proverb is so old that it actually was floating around in Greek in the fifth century or so?). Although found in most English translations, the two oldest Greek witnesses to the passage, Siniaticus and Vaticanus (ℵ and B) omit "When it is evening...times." So do X Y Γ (ninth century), 157 (late but valuable), 579 (which however adds something similar after verse 9), the best of the group of manuscripts known as the Ferrar Group (f13, or φ), the two oldest translations into Syriac, the oldest three texts in Coptic, and the Armenian translation. The verse are found in C of the fifth century, D of the fifth or sixth (a very erratic text with interpolations from the Latin), N of the sixth, the vast majority of the manuscripts from the eighth century onward, and all Latin translations.
Westcott and Hort's text, which was the de facto standard from about 1890 to 1965, omits the words; so does the New English Bible. The United Bible Societies edition, which was the de facto standard from the 1960s to the present, places the words in brackets, meaning that they doubt their originality but aren't certain enough to omit them from the text. Hence their inclusion in the New Revised Standard Version and most editions made since 2000 or so. Personally, I incline to omit them. My guess is that this is a Latin proverb that was interpolated into the Latin Bible (things like that happened more than once), then was translated into Greek and interpolate Greek Bible. - RBW
Last updated in version 6.8
File: NCF193RS

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