The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late
"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 ", 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.
Illustration of the poem's 16th-century or older original, "Hey Diddle Diddle, the Cat and the Fiddle" by Randolph Caldecott, 1882. Tolkien's version features "a tipsy cat that plays a five-stringed fiddle".
Relief sculpture on wall of the Cat and Fiddle public house. The pub name derives from the nursery rhyme.
Scholars have compared the song to Moon and Sun stories at different levels, all the way back to the Greek myth of Phaethon who brought the Sun too close to the Earth. Roman sarcophagus depicting the fall of Phaethon.
In 1997 the Tolkien Ensemble performed the song in a setting by ensemble members Caspar Reiff and Peter Hall.
"Hey Diddle Diddle" is an English nursery rhyme. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 19478.
Illustration by William Wallace Denslow
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.