Hey Diddle Diddle

DESCRIPTION: "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."
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1844 (Halliwell)
KEYWORDS: animal dog music fiddle nonballad
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REFERENCES (4 citations):
Opie/Opie-OxfordDictionaryOfNurseryRhymes 213, "Hey Diddle Diddle" (1 text)
Jack-PopGoesTheWeasel, p. 65, "Hey Diddle Diddle" (1 text)
Dolby-OrangesAndLemons, p. 127, "Hey Diddle Diddle, the Cat and the Fiddle" (1 text)
ADDITIONAL: Tim Devlin, _Cracking Humpty Dumpty: An Investigative Trail of Favorite Nursery Rhymes_, Susak Press, 2022, pp. 41-48, "Hey Diddle Diddle" (2 texts plus some possibly-related lyrics)
Roud #19478
NOTES [585 words]: The Opies list no fewer than six proposed meanings for this rhyme, and Jack-PopGoesTheWeasel comes up with another, putting it in the reign of Richard III (in which case the Cat is Sir William Catesby and the Dog is Viscount Lovell, from the line "The Cat, the Rat [Richard Ratcliffe], and Lovell our dog, Rule old England under the Hog [Richard III's emblem was a boar]." (Unfortunately, Jack, and Devlin, who mentions this possibility on pp. 43-44, claim that Richard III was "highly unpopular," which is probably wrong -- what was unpopular was admitting, after he had been overthrown, to having supported Richard.)
Jack also mentions a link to Elizabeth I; this goes back at least to Katherine Elwes Thomas, The Real Personages of Mother Goose, Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co., 1930, pp. 136-137, which makes Elizabeth herself the cat *and* the cow which jumps over the moon. -- or, perhaps, Elizabeth the cat and the dish and spoon being Lady Katherine Grey (the sister of Jane Grey) and her eventual husband Edward Seymour (Devlin, p. 43). None of these makes much sense to me.
Devlin, p. 41, cites Halliwell's speculation that this originated in ancient Greece. Devlin quotes the reconstructed Greek as αδ αδηλα, δηλα δ’αδε. These are the letters given by Halliwell, but the accents and spacing are wrong; I too have to omit the accents to keep this intelligible when translated into ASCII, but it should be αδ’ αδηλα, δηλα δ’ αδε. Αδε is an irregular form of ανδανω, which Halliwell translates as "sing," but Liddell/Scott give as "to please" or "to express an opinion." δηλαδη is "to be clear," so αδηλαδη is "to be unclear." Hence Halliwell translates his lyric as "Sing words not clear, and sing words clear" -- but it seems to me it's more like "To not please but to please." (assuming δ’ = δε, δε being a contrastive particle with a force somewhere between our "and" and "but." The other possibility is that δ’ = δια, which roughly means "through," which would give us "To fail to please by means of pleasing"). But I don't believe Halliwell's re-creation anyway.
Devlin himself recalls thinking (p. 42) that the rhyme is about Henry VIII, Catherine of Aragon, and Anne Boleyn, but does not know where the idea originated; he rejected it upon consideration. Additional explanations on pp. 44-48 of Devlin involve various pubs, stargazing, Egyptian gods (! -- this one goes back to Lewis Spence, and is crazy enough to make Katherine Elwes Thomas blush), and a farmer named "Hey" who farmed near Bolton Priory.
I think a good general rule is that, when something admits of this many plausible but unprovable explanations, it's probably about none of them....
In one of his earliest attempts to examine what the lost archetypes of nursery rhymes might have been like, J. R. R. Tolkien dramatically expanded this as "The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late," found in the Prancing Pony section The Lord of the Rings and as #5 in the Adventures of Tom Bombadil which first appear in 1923 (source: Shippey, p. 36), which I believe means that either it or Tolkien's other "Man in the Moon" poem, "The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon" (his attempt to "explain" the nursery rhyme of that name) was the first published example of the Middle-Earth writings.
George MacDonald also fiddled with the poem; he made a sort of expanded combination of the two "moon" rhymes in "The True History of the Cat and the Fiddle" in the chapter "Another Early Bird," chapter 24 of At the Back of the North Wind. - RBW
Bibliography

Devlin: Tim Devlin, Cracking Humpty Dumpty: An Investigative Trail of Favorite Nursery Rhymes, Susak Press, 2022
Liddell/Scott: Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, fifth edition, Oxford, 1864
Shippey: Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle-Earth, revised edition, Houghton-Mifflin, 2003

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