The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late
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.
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.
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.
[3] They are both included in the short collection of Tolkien's verse, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, with the frame story of being poems enjoyed by hobbits.
[T 1][4][5] 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.
Some sources suggest it may be a thousand or more years old: a cat playing a fiddle was a popular image in early medieval illuminated manuscripts.
The ostler has a tipsy cat that plays a five-stringed fiddle; And up and down he runs his bow, Now squeaking high, now purring low, now sawing in the middle.
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".
The "merry old inn" is contrasted with the "grey hill", the cat's fiddle is appropriately "purring low",[7] while the round Man in the Moon is twice described as rolling.
[7] 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.
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.
The seemingly frivolous nursery rhymes are taken to have[13] contain[ed], at least in their early versions, hints of mythological significance – the Man in the Moon who fails to drive his chariot while mortals panic and his white horses champ their silver bits and the Sun comes up to overtake him is not totally unlike the Greek myth of Phaethon, who drove the horses of the sun too close to Earth and scorched it.
[14] She states that readers quickly appreciate that Frodo's performance of an entertaining but "ridiculous song", supposedly written by his cousin Bilbo, is evidently "a highly sophisticated and literary derivative of the 'real world' nursery rhyme 'The Cat and the Fiddle'".
[14] This stands in sharp contrast with Sam Gamgee's recital of "The Stone Troll", at once amusing and "metrically intricate", which the other hobbits make clear is new.
[14] The medievalist Thomas Honegger writes that Tolkien gives the theme of the Man in the Moon a "multi-layered treatment" that gives it a "complexity and depth" comparable with the actual folk tradition that reaches back some eight centuries, spanning the 14th-century Middle English "Man in the Moon" poem in the Harley Lyrics, which he quotes at length with a parallel translation.
[15] He constantly created these, whether pastiches and parodies like "Fastitocalon"; adaptations in medieval metres, like "The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun" or "asterisk texts" like his "The Cat & The Fiddle"; and finally "new wine in old bottles" such as "The Nameless Land" and Aelfwine's Annals.
[20] In Kevin Wallace and Saul Zaentz's 2006 musical theatre production of The Lord of the Rings, presented in Toronto and London, the hobbits Frodo, Merry, Pippin, Sam, and the Breelanders sing a version of the song as "The Cat and the Moon", cut down to 4-line stanzas with a different metre.
