Hello,
I’ve been listening to the Exploring LOTR course in podcast form for about 9 months now, and I am still many moons behind: I just reached episode 51, with its discussion of Frodo’s song in the Prancing Pony. In general I’ve stopped myself from commenting here when something has grabbed me in the discussion, because I know I’m a long way behind the current class (though catching up slowly!). But one thing really struck me as missing from the discussion of the rhythmic meter of the poem and I wanted to mention it. Of course it’s very possible that it’s already been brought up in a later class that I haven’t listened to yet.
In episode 51, there was extensive discussion of the meter of the poem, which is something like 4.3.4.4.3:
There is an inn, a merry old inn
beneath an old grey hill,
And there they brew a beer so brown
That the Man in the Moon himself came down
one night to drink his fill.
Several interesting points were made about this meter and how it interacts with the rhyme structure to link different parts of the stanza together, make it feel a little off-centre especially because of the way line 4 sounds like an unexpected extension of line 3. No doubt all this is true. But it seems to me to miss a larger point: that Tolkien was simply imitating the original meter of the nursery rhyme ‘Hey diddle diddle’ on which this song is based, which was taught to me as follows:
Hey diddle diddle, the cat had a fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon,
The little dog laughed to see such fun
And the dish ran away with the spoon, the spoon,
And the dish ran away with the spoon.
Obviously there are some interesting differences. The nursery rhyme repeats line 4 to create line 5, giving a sense of the verse being playfully extended at the end rather than in the middle, and the rhyme structure is correspondingly different. But it seems clear to me that Tolkien’s starting point was an intention to reproduce the rhythm of the original and develop it for his own purposes.
This parallel seemed so obvious to me, and yet neither Corey nor the commenters mentioned it in class, that I wondered whether the US version of the nursery rhyme is different in some way. And indeed a bit of googling suggests that some versions of the nursery rhyme omit the repetition of the last line:
Hey diddle diddle, the cat had a fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon,
The little dog laughed to see such fun
And the dish ran away with the spoon.
I guess if you grew up with this version of the rhyme you might never notice the link with Tolkien. Perhaps the shorter version is the “original”. But it is a common feature of folk songs and poems, designed to be performed for audiences and perhaps involve audience participation, that lines get repeated or extended so that the audience can join in with the repetition, and that payoffs get delayed so that the audience can enjoy the anticipation. You see common forms of it in 17th-century “pub singing” versions of popular Christian hymns from England, for instance:
While shepherds watched their flocks by night,
All seated on the ground,
The angel of the Lord came down
And glory shone around, [around]
And glory shone around.
Sometimes this is taken to extremes:
Where has’ tha been sin’ I saw thee (I saw thee)
On Ilkley Moor ba’ t’at?
Where has’ tha been sin’ I saw thee?
Where has’ tha been sin’ I saw thee,
On Ilkley Moor ba’ t’at,
On Ilkley Moor ba’ t’at,
On Ilkley Moor ba’ t’at?
In any case, the version of ‘Hey diddle diddle’ I grew up with (in northern England in the 1980s) was the five-line version that I’d put money on being the version that inspired Tolkien, too.
Sorry for dragging the class so far back into its history! And thanks for making this amazing resource available in so many ways for free. I am really enjoying following along, albeit so far behind.
I’ve been listening to the Exploring LOTR course in podcast form for about 9 months now, and I am still many moons behind: I just reached episode 51, with its discussion of Frodo’s song in the Prancing Pony. In general I’ve stopped myself from commenting here when something has grabbed me in the discussion, because I know I’m a long way behind the current class (though catching up slowly!). But one thing really struck me as missing from the discussion of the rhythmic meter of the poem and I wanted to mention it. Of course it’s very possible that it’s already been brought up in a later class that I haven’t listened to yet.
In episode 51, there was extensive discussion of the meter of the poem, which is something like 4.3.4.4.3:
There is an inn, a merry old inn
beneath an old grey hill,
And there they brew a beer so brown
That the Man in the Moon himself came down
one night to drink his fill.
Several interesting points were made about this meter and how it interacts with the rhyme structure to link different parts of the stanza together, make it feel a little off-centre especially because of the way line 4 sounds like an unexpected extension of line 3. No doubt all this is true. But it seems to me to miss a larger point: that Tolkien was simply imitating the original meter of the nursery rhyme ‘Hey diddle diddle’ on which this song is based, which was taught to me as follows:
Hey diddle diddle, the cat had a fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon,
The little dog laughed to see such fun
And the dish ran away with the spoon, the spoon,
And the dish ran away with the spoon.
Obviously there are some interesting differences. The nursery rhyme repeats line 4 to create line 5, giving a sense of the verse being playfully extended at the end rather than in the middle, and the rhyme structure is correspondingly different. But it seems clear to me that Tolkien’s starting point was an intention to reproduce the rhythm of the original and develop it for his own purposes.
This parallel seemed so obvious to me, and yet neither Corey nor the commenters mentioned it in class, that I wondered whether the US version of the nursery rhyme is different in some way. And indeed a bit of googling suggests that some versions of the nursery rhyme omit the repetition of the last line:
Hey diddle diddle, the cat had a fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon,
The little dog laughed to see such fun
And the dish ran away with the spoon.
I guess if you grew up with this version of the rhyme you might never notice the link with Tolkien. Perhaps the shorter version is the “original”. But it is a common feature of folk songs and poems, designed to be performed for audiences and perhaps involve audience participation, that lines get repeated or extended so that the audience can join in with the repetition, and that payoffs get delayed so that the audience can enjoy the anticipation. You see common forms of it in 17th-century “pub singing” versions of popular Christian hymns from England, for instance:
While shepherds watched their flocks by night,
All seated on the ground,
The angel of the Lord came down
And glory shone around, [around]
And glory shone around.
Sometimes this is taken to extremes:
Where has’ tha been sin’ I saw thee (I saw thee)
On Ilkley Moor ba’ t’at?
Where has’ tha been sin’ I saw thee?
Where has’ tha been sin’ I saw thee,
On Ilkley Moor ba’ t’at,
On Ilkley Moor ba’ t’at,
On Ilkley Moor ba’ t’at?
In any case, the version of ‘Hey diddle diddle’ I grew up with (in northern England in the 1980s) was the five-line version that I’d put money on being the version that inspired Tolkien, too.
Sorry for dragging the class so far back into its history! And thanks for making this amazing resource available in so many ways for free. I am really enjoying following along, albeit so far behind.
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