Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon, The

DESCRIPTION: "The man in the moon Came down too soon, And asked his way to Norwich; He went by the south, And burnt his mouth With supping cold plum porridge."
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1810 (Gammer Gurton's Garland)
KEYWORDS: food injury travel
FOUND IN: Ireland
REFERENCES (5 citations):
Kane-SongsAndSayingsOfAnUlsterChildhood, p. 138, "The man in the moon came tumbling down" (1 text)
Opie/Opie-OxfordDictionaryOfNurseryRhymes 331, "The man in the moon" (1 text)
Dolby-OrangesAndLemons, p. 91, "The Man in the Moon" (1 text)
ADDITIONAL: J. R. R. Tolkien, _The Adventures of Tom Bombadil_ (1962), expanded edition edited by Christina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond, HarperCollins, 2014, p. 185, "(no title)" (1 text)
Christina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond, _The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Reader's Guide_, Houghton Mifflin, 2006, p. 579, "(no tite)" (1 text)
Roud #19744
NOTES [916 words]: 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 Came Down Too Soon," later to become #6 in the Adventures of Tom Bombadil; Tolkien's poem first appeared in 1923 (Shippey, p. 36), which I believe means that either it or Tolkien's other "Man in the Moon" poem, "The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late" (his attempt to "explain" "Hey Diddle Diddle, the Cat and the Fiddle") was the first published example of the Middle-Earth writings. According to TolkienBombadil, p. 186, Tolkien's oldest manuscript copy of his poem dates from March 1915. At one stage, Tolkien used the subtitle "An East Anglian Phantasy," although he later dropped that.
There has been a surprising amount of scholarship about this particular poem and what Tolkien did with it; these are listed in the Scull/Hammond reference cited above.
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.
There was quite a bit of medieval folklore about the Man in the Moon (most of which Tolkien would have known although MacDonald likely did not); Brown, p. 234, says: "According to the general folk-story, the Man in the Moon was a thief, and he was represented as carrying a bundle of thorns. In the Low Countries he was named Burno" -- a connection with burning his mouth? Similarly Dickins/Wilson, pp. 131, "According to a widespread folk-tale the man in the moon is supposed to be a peasant who has been banished there because he has stolen the thorns or brushwood which he is carrying on his fork."
Brown also says, "Popular tradition connected the Man in the Moon with the story of Cain, as O. F. Emerson has shown ('Medieval Legends of Cain', PMLA, xxi, 841-3). The legend of the Man in the Moon and his bundle of thorns was mentioned in the fifteenth century by Henryson in the Testament of Cressid:
On her brest a chorle painted ful even
Bearing a bush of thorns on his backe
Which for his theft might clime no ner the heven.
"It is twice introduced by Shakespeare, M.N.D., Act V, Sc. i, and Tempest, Act II, Sc. ii."
The Henryson text cited, according to both Kindrick, p. 164, and Fox, p. 119, is lines 261-263, i.e. the second through fourth lines of stanza 38 (the poem is in seven-line stanzas). Kendrick, p. 181, also mentions the link through Shakespeare: "The churl bearing a bunch of thorns on his back as part of the moon's iconography reminds one of the rude mechanicals' efforts to represent Moonshine with his 'bunch' of thorns in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream."
That the Henryson lines refer to the moon is made clear in line 253, which refers to "lady Cynthia," which in line 254 is said to be the planet "swiftest in her spheir" (Fox, p. 119).
It appears that Brown's text is quoted from one of the Anglicized editions (probably William Thynne's) and likely does not represent the original Scots text very well. Fox, who used all three surviving prints, gives the text of the three lines as
And on hir breist ane churle paintit full euin
Beirand ane bunche of thornis on his bak,
Quhilk for his thift micht clim na nar the heuin.
Both Fox and Kindrick read "bunch" for Brown's "bush"; "bush" is read only by Thynne. There are no other variations in the lines except those caused by Anglicization.
Brown, pp. 160-161; Davies, #15, pp, 71-72, and Dickins/Wilson, pp. 123-124, cite an even earlier Man in the Moon poem (which is why both Brown and Dickins/Wilson were commenting on the legend), from MS. Harley 2253 (the transcription is Brown's; Dickins/Wilson's has "ant" for "&" in the first line; Davies modernizes a bit):
Mon in þe mone stond & strit,
On is bot-forke is burþen he bereþ;
Hit is much wonder þat he nadoun slyt,
for doute lest he valle, he shoddreþ and shereþ.
Loosely translated:
Man in the moon stands and strides,
On his forked stick [hay-fork?] his burden he bears.
It is a great wonder that he does not sit down
For fear that he fall, he shudders and swerves. (Davies gives a translation/modernization of the whole thing.)
(Brown/Robbins-IndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse #2066; DigitalIndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse #3362, which lists sixteen printings as of November 20, 2023.)
The poem goes on to describe him as driving stakes to establish a boundary, and calls him the slowest man that ever was born, who does little work. Finally he disappears in the dark (again giving us a possible link to the man coming down in this rhyme).
The source manuscript is the famous Harley 2253, the "Harley Lyrics," which in general do not appear to be "folk."
This poem was reprinted by Ritson in Ancient Songs and Ballads, but Ritson misunderstood it at several points. (To be fair, Shippey, p. 37, while calling it "perhaps the best medieval English lyric surviving" also says it is "certainly one of the hardest, prompting man learned articles and interpretations.") Despite its presence in the Harley Lyrics,I think it fairly likely that it is a "folk" piece, but there is no evidence of a tune, and it is so old that we really can't place it in a folk context.
Despite all this Man in the Moon folklore, the incomprehensibly imaginative Katherine Elwes Thomas (Thomas, p. 196) thinks this is about Earl Bothwell and his troubles after he married Mary Queen of Scots. - RBW
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