Aiken Drum

DESCRIPTION: Aiken Drum lives in the moon, plays with a ladle, dresses in food including breeches of haggis bags. Willy Wood lives in another town, plays on a razor, eats Aiken Drum's clothes but chokes on the haggis bags
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1828 (Lyle-Andrew-CrawfurdsCollectionVolume2)
KEYWORDS: clothes death food humorous talltale
FOUND IN: Britain(Scotland(Bord))
REFERENCES (8 citations):
Lyle-Andrew-CrawfurdsCollectionVolume2 164, "Aitken Drum" (1 text)
Opie/Opie-OxfordDictionaryOfNurseryRhymes 7, "There was a man lived in the moon, lived in the moon, lived in the moon" (1 text)
Baring-Gould-AnnotatedMotherGoose #254, pp. 157-158, "(There was a man lived in the moon, lived in the moon, lived in the moon)"
Montgomerie/Montgomerie-ScottishNurseryRhymes 97, "(There came a man to our town)" (1 short text)
Dolby-OrangesAndLemons, p. 25, "Aiken Drum" (1 text)
Delamar-ChildrensCountingOutRhymes, p. 95, "Aiken Drum" (1 text)
DT, AIKDRUM* AIKDRUM3*
ADDITIONAL: Katherine Briggs, _An Encyclopedia of Fairies: Hobgoblines, Brownies, Bogies, and Other Supernatural Creatures_, 1976 (I use the 1977 Pantheon paperback), p. 2, article "Aiken Drum" (1 partial text plus extended discussion)
Roud #2571
NOTES [117 words]: A haggis bag, I guess, would be a sheep's stomach lining. - BS
The dating on this song is a bit uncertain. The Opies apparently cite 1821 on the basis of Hogg's Jacobite Relics -- but that is the other "Aikendrum" ("Ken ye how a Whig can fight, aikendrum, aikendrum). It is generally claimed that the word "Aikendrum" in that song is derived from the character in this, which would of course make this older -- but I know of no proof of that assertion. Hogg does quote a snippet of what appears to be this song, but the whole thing is awfully thin. The Lyle-Crawfurd 1828 date is firmer. Briggs gives a firm date of 1878 for "Aiken Drum" as the name of a brownie mentioned by William Nicholson. - RBW
Last updated in version 6.4
File: OO2007

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