The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late

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.[3] In this case the question is: what lies 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 artifacts 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[3]

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.[3]

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."[3]

Steven M. Deyo, in Mythlore, notes that Tolkien introduced the poem by saying that it "must be derived ultimately from Gondor ... based on the traditions of Men".[T 4][4] Deyo agrees that "traditions of Men" is correct; the poem is based on the Harley manuscript poem 2253, quoting Shippey that it is "perhaps the best medieval English lyric surviving, and certainly one of the hardest" to interpret. He endorses Shippey's suggestion of an imagined prehistory of the nursery rhyme, where[4]

If one assumes a long tradition of 'idle children' repeating 'thoughtless tales' in increasing confusion, one might think that poems like Tolkien's were the remote ancestors of the modern rhymes.[3]

The Tolkien scholar Dimitra Fimi writes that Tolkien is clearly setting Frodo's song apart as a performance of a traditional work. 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'". 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, and that Sam, despite his basic education, must have created it, with "the rare quality of impromptu improvisation modelled upon traditional forms, a quality that many traditional folksingers display".[5]

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, Harley 2253, which he quotes at length with a parallel translation. The "nonsensical nursery rhymes" inspired Tolkien's two poems ("... Stayed Up Too Late" and "... Came Down Too Soon"). At the "high mythology" level, the Old Norse myth of Máni corresponds to Tolkien's creation myths with the ships which carry Sun and Moon (Tilion) across the heavens. At the level of story, the unlucky fellow banished to the moon roughly matches (Honegger writes) Tolkien's old elf Uole Kuvion who hid on the Ship of the Moon "and has been living there ever since".[6][T 5][T 6]

John D. Rateliff notes that Tolkien stated that when he read a medieval work, he wanted to write a modern one in the same tradition. 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. The works are extremely varied, but all are "suffused with medieval borrowings", making them, writes Rateliff, "most readers' portal into medieval literature". Not all found use in Middle-earth (as "The Cat & The Fiddle" eventually did), but they all helped Tolkien develop a medieval-style craft that enabled him to create the attractively authentic Middle-earth legendarium.[7] Paul N. Hyde writes in Mythlore that the poem was at first a humorous commentary on the plentiful "'nonsense' that had been written" about "The Cat and the Fiddle".[2]

This list identifies each item's location in Tolkien's writings.