Hey Diddle Diddle

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"Hey Diddle Diddle"
Roud #19478
Written by Traditional
Published c. 1765
Written England
Language English
Form Nursery Rhyme
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.

"Hey Diddle Diddle" (also "Hi Diddle Diddle"), "The Cat and the Fiddle", or "The Cow Jumped Over the Moon" is an English nursery rhyme. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 19478.

Contents

[edit] Lyrics

The most commonly used modern version of the rhyme is:

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.[1]

In more recent versions the archaic 'sport' is replaced with 'fun'.

[edit] Origins

Cow jumps spoon, according to Denslow

The earliest recorded version of the poem was printed in London in Mother Goose's Melody around 1765, with the lyrics:

High diddle diddle,
The Cat and the Fiddle,
The Cow jump'd over the Moon,
The little dog laugh'd to see such Craft,
And the Dish ran away with the Spoon.[1]

There is a reference in Thomas Preston's A lamentable tragedy mixed ful of pleasant mirth, conteyning the life of Cambises King of Percia, printed in 1569 that may refer to the rhyme:

They be at hand Sir with stick and fidle;
They can play a new dance called hey-didle-didle.[1]

There are numerous theories about the origin of the rhyme, these include: James Orchard Halliwell's suggestion that it was a corruption of ancient Greek, probably advanced as a result of a deliberate hoax; that it was connected with Hathor worship; that it refers to various constellations (Taurus, Canis minor etc); that is describes the Flight from Egypt; that it depicts Elizabeth, Lady Katherine Grey, and her relationships with the earls of Hertford and Leicester; that it deals with anti-clerical feeling over injunctions by Catholic priests for harder work; that it describes Katherine of Aragon (Katherine la Fidèle); Catherine, the wife of Peter the Great; Canton de Fidèle, a supposed governor of Calais and the game of cat (trap-ball).[1] This profusion of unsupported explanations was satirised by J.R.R. Tolkien in his fictional explanations of 'The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late'.[2] Most scholarly commentators consider these unproven and that the verse is probably meant to be simply nonsense.[1]

[edit] In popular culture

  • Hey Diddle Diddle may have also been the inspiration for "Hi Diddlee Dee", a song in the Disney animated film Pinocchio (1940).
  • In the novel The Lord of the Rings (1954-5), J. R. R. Tolkien expanded on this rhyme, when Frodo Baggins is dancing in the Prancing Pony tavern in Bree he sings a song allegedly written by his first (and second) cousin Bilbo Baggins.
  • In the Broadway musical Rent, Maureen Johnson uses imagery from this nursery rhyme in her protests over the destruction of a housing lot for the building of a cyber-arts studio.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ a b c d e I. Opie and P. Opie, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (Oxford University Press, 1951, 2nd edn., 1997), pp. 203-4.
  2. ^ S. H. Gale, Encyclopedia of British Humorists: Geoffrey Chaucer to John Cleese (London: Taylor & Francis, 1996), p. 1127.
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