Hey Diddle Diddle

"Hey Diddle Diddle" (also "Hi Diddle Diddle", "The Cat and the Fiddle", or "The Cow Jumped over the Moon") is an English nursery rhyme. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 19478.

Lyrics and music

thumb|From Denslow's Mother Goose (1901)

A version of the rhyme is:

Hey diddle diddle,

The cat and the fiddle,

The cow jumped over the moon;

The little dog laughed

To see such sport,

And the dish ran away with the spoon.</poem>

The rhyme is the source of the English expression "over the Moon", meaning "delighted, thrilled, extremely happy".

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Hey! did -- dle, did -- dle,

the cat and the fidd -- le,

the cow jumped o -- ver the moon;

the lit -- tle dog laughed

to see such sport,

and the dish ran af -- ter the spoon.

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The melody commonly associated with the rhyme was first recorded by the composer and nursery rhyme collector James William Elliott in his National Nursery Rhymes and Nursery Songs (1870). The word "sport" in the rhyme is sometimes replaced with "fun", "a sight", or "craft".

Origins

thumb|In this [[Randolph Caldecott rendition, a dish, spoon, and other utensils are anthropomorphized while a cat in a red jacket holds a fiddle in the manner of a string bass.]]

The rhyme may date back to at least the sixteenth century. Some references suggest it dates back in some form a thousand or more years: in early medieval illuminated manuscripts a cat playing a fiddle was a popular image. There is a reference in Thomas Preston's play A lamentable tragedy mixed ful of pleasant mirth, conteyning the life of Cambises King of Percia, printed in 1569 that may refer to the rhyme:

<blockquote><poem>They be at hand Sir with stick and fiddle;

They can play a new dance called hey-diddle-diddle.</poem></blockquote>

The name "Cat and the Fiddle" was a common name for inns, including one known to have been at Old Chaunge, London by 1587.</poem></blockquote>

This is accompanied with the following commentary:

<blockquote><poem>It must be a little dog that laugh'd, for a great dog would be ashamed to laugh at such nonsense.

Another theory is that it comes from a low Dutch anti-clerical rhyme about priests demanding hard work. Other alleged bases for the rhyme include the Egyptian goddess Hathor, the Hebrew Flight from Egypt, or even the relationships of Elizabeth, Lady Katherine Grey, with the Earls of Hertford and Leicester. The "cat and the fiddle" has also been tied to Catherine of Aragon, Catherine I of Russia, Canton de Fidèle, an alleged governor of Calais, and the game of cat (trap-ball).

The profusion of unsupported explanations was satirised by J. R. R. Tolkien in his fictional explanations of the poem "The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late" referenced above. Although there is some support for the trap-ball theory, scholarly commentators mostly conclude the rhyme is simply meant to be nonsense verse, a type of literary nonsense.