The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late
Poem in The Lord of the Rings / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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"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.[1] 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.