Hey, Diddle Diddle!

When I started this blog a little over a week ago, I used a poem from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings as an introduction and to explain the name I chose for the blog. The poem was an example of Tolkien's reworking of a familiar adage to suit his purpose. I think it is also quite a nice piece of verse.

Just a little before he unveils "All That Is Gold Does Not Glitter" to introduce the character of Strider, Tolkien worked a similar kind of magic, even more grandly, on an old nursery rhyme. The rhyme is "Hey, Diddle Diddle," and it goes as follows:

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.


On the surface, this seems to be a nonsense rhyme. Whether there is anything more significant to its origins is a matter of some speculation. It's certainly difficult to see it as the culmination of any sensible narration, but this is, in fact, the challenge that Tolkien undertook. To create a humorous song for Frodo to perform while the hobbits were guests at the inn The Sign of the Prancing Pony in Bree, he imagined a story in which the verse with which we are familiar is but a small part. Within the vast historical and philological context that Tolkien created for his stories, he is, in essence, suggesting that the nursery rhyme we know is the only surviving part of a longer text that dates back to the Third Age of Middle-earth.

He called the resulting song "The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late." Unfortunately, the tune to which Frodo sang the story that night in Bree, is, like most of the lyric was, prior to Tolkien, lost in antiquity. However, I believe that there are some who have set the verses to new music. Anyway, even without music, it's an interesting read, and much more satisfying, narratively speaking, than the short nursery rhyme.

You can read the whole poem here. Let me know how you like it.