thumb|upright=1.35|1882 illustration by [[Randolph Caldecott of the centuries-old nursery rhyme "Hey Diddle Diddle, the Cat and the Fiddle". Tolkien's version features "a tipsy cat that plays a five-stringed fiddle".]]
"The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late" is J. R. R. Tolkien's imagined original song behind the nursery rhyme "Hey Diddle Diddle (The Cat and the Fiddle)", invented by back-formation. It was first published in Yorkshire Poetry magazine in 1923, and was reused in extended form in the 1954–55 The Lord of the Rings as a song sung by Frodo Baggins in the Prancing Pony inn. The extended version was republished in the 1962 collection The Adventures of Tom Bombadil.
Scholars have noted that Tolkien liked to imitate medieval works, and that the light-hearted poem fits into a reworking by Tolkien of the "Man in the Moon" tradition. This tradition consisted of myths such as that of Phaethon who drove the Sun too close to the Earth, down through a medieval story of the unlucky man who was banished to the Moon, and ultimately to a short nursery rhyme. Tolkien similarly wrote a myth of the creation, with the Sun and Moon carried on ships across the sky; and a story of an Elf who hid on the ship of the Moon, so as to create a multi-layered effect within his writings similar to the real medieval tradition.
The song has been set to music and recorded by The Tolkien Ensemble. In the extended edition of Peter Jackson's 2012 film The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, the Dwarf Bofur sings it at Elrond's feast in Rivendell. A rewritten version is sung in Kevin Wallace and Saul Zaentz's 2006 musical theatre production of The Lord of the Rings.
Context
Tolkien
J. R. R. Tolkien, known as the author of fantasy books on Middle-earth including the bestselling 1937 children's book The Hobbit and the 1954-55 fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings, was a professional philologist, specialising in the understanding of the words used in medieval manuscripts such as Beowulf. He was a professor of English Language at the University of Leeds, and then at the University of Oxford, where he taught at Pembroke College.
Tolkien wrote two Man in the Moon poems, both related to traditional verses. They are "The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon" and "The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late", the latter according to Tolkien "derived ultimately from Gondor ... based on the traditions of Men".
Early in The Lord of the Rings, at The Prancing Pony inn at Bree, the protagonist Frodo Baggins jumps on a table and recites "a ridiculous song" supposedly invented by his cousin Bilbo. "Here it is in full", said Tolkien, alluding to the shortness of the nursery rhyme. "Only a few words of it are now, as a rule, remembered."
Nursery rhyme
The original "Hey Diddle Diddle" nursery rhyme, on which Tolkien's song is based,
Harley lyrics
An unnamed Middle English poem in Harley Manuscript no. 2253 is known under the modern English name "The Man in the Moon". Tolkien was aware of the poem, and may have wanted to connect it in some way to his stories, though he does not use the Middle English poem's central theme, a thornbush. The poem begins:
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| <poem></poem>
| <poem>The Man in the moon stands and strides
On his hay-fork his burden he bears.
It is a great wonder that he does not slip down—
For fear of falling he shudders and swerves!
When the frost freezes, great cold he suffers.
The thorns are sharp—his clothes [they] tear.
There is no wight in the world that knows when he sits down,
Nor (unless it is the hedgerow) what clothes he wears.</poem>
|}
Song
The song is written in 13 stanzas. The first five introduce the characters of the Hey diddle diddle nursery rhyme, and add the Man in the Moon and an inn complete with its ostler and landlord. The last eight stanzas embellish the nursery rhyme; the poetry teachers Collette Drifte and Mike Jubb write that Tolkien use them to enliven the tale with "detail, character, and with fun in his mastery of the language".
Structure
The rhythm is a "jaunty"]]
Tolkien chooses to set the song's story in the context of "a merry old inn" with fine beer to attract the Man in the Moon. The song introduces each element of the original nursery rhyme in turn: the Man in the Moon in the first stanza, the musical cat in the second, the little dog in the third, the hornéd cow in the fourth, and the silver dishes and spoons in the fifth.
The story proper begins with the sixth stanza, with the Man in the Moon "drinking deep" and the cat wailing. Now is the moment for the dish and the spoon to dance "on the table"<!--like Frodo-->, as the cow and the little dog start rushing about. Stanza seven sees the Man in the Moon drink another mug of ale, and fall asleep "beneath his chair". This is the cue for the ostler to tell his "tipsy cat" that the Man in the Moon needs to be woken up, and in the ninth stanza, the cat "on his fiddle played hey-diddle-diddle, a jig that would wake the dead" and the landlord tries without success to wake the dozing Man.
Abandoning the attempt, they instead roll the Man back "up the hill" into the Moon, followed by the dish who "ran up with a spoon". The cat plays faster and faster, and all the inn's guests barring the Man himself "bounded from their beds" and danced. Stanza twelve sees the cat's frenzied playing break the fiddle's strings, and "the little dog laughed to see such fun" while "the Saturday dish went off at a run / with the silver Sunday spoon", expanding upon the last of the original nursery rhyme's words. Finally, the Moon rolls "behind the hill" as the Sun rises, astonished to see everyone going back to bed.
Publication history
The 1923 version was written long before either of Tolkien's hobbit novels, The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings, were planned.
The version of the song printed in The Lord of the Rings is slightly longer, at thirteen ballad-like five-line stanzas. Shippey writes that Tolkien was in effect "raiding his own larder" for suitable materials.
Reception
An imagined prehistory of poetry
The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey notes that nobody would call "The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late" a serious poem. All the same, he cites it and its mate, "The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon" (also from 1923, also subsequently included in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil), as typical examples of Tolkien's working strategy for reconstructing philological information about sources now lost. In this case, the question is what the history is behind the abbreviated version of this poem that survives as a well-known but nonsensical nursery rhyme. By imagining a text that might reasonably have left the surviving rhyme, one can deduce clues that might have left other artefacts in surviving literature. Shippey argues that many of the scenarios in Tolkien's more serious work are similar recreations (asterisk' poems" in Shippey's phrase), attempting to explain abstruse passages in surviving Old English and Old Norse texts. The seemingly frivolous nursery rhymes are taken to have