THE man in the moon
Came tumbling down
And asked his way to Norwich;
He went by the south,
And burned his mouth
While supping cold plum porridge.
For centuries, people have seen in the surface of the moon either a face or the shape of a man, traditionally believed to be carrying a bundle of sticks and with a little dog at his side. Quite why, in the rhyme, he wanted to go to Norwich is anybody’s guess – clearly he didn’t know any other towns that rhymed with porridge. And quite why he should burn his mouth on something cold is another conundrum – one intended to amuse a child audience.
According to Western folklore, one Sunday, a long time ago, an old man went into the woods with his dog to collect firewood. Having gathered enough sticks, he slung his bag over his shoulder and began the trudge home. Before long, he met a man, who stopped him and said, ‘It is Sunday. Don’t you know that all good Christians should be resting from their work today?’ The old man laughed and replied, ‘Sunday on earth, Monday in heaven, it is all the same to me.’ The man, a good Christian himself, was outraged: ‘Then bear your burden for ever. As you do not value Sunday on earth, then every day will be a moon day for you. You shall stand for eternity in the moon as a warning to all Sabbath breakers.’ With that, the man banished the old fellow to the moon, along with his dog and his bundle of sticks.
Though perhaps most famous for writing the hymn ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’, Victorian folksong collector, vicar and all-round eccentric Sabine Baring-Gould (1834-1924) was obsessed with the moon and listed all kinds of references to the man supposed to inhabit it. In one version of the story, for instance, the man is carrying willow boughs. In another, he is a sheep stealer who entices sheep with cabbages. Baring-Gould also recounts how the nursery rhyme of Jack and Jill derives from a Norse legend, in which the moon kidnaps two children, Hjuki and Bil. According to this theory, the figure that we see in the moon is Jack (Hjuki); Jill (Bil) is also there, but less easy to make out. The names ‘Hjuki’ and ‘Bil’ mean ‘creation’ and ‘destruction’, reflecting the waxing and waning of the moon.
In China, the man in the moon is called Wu Kang; believed to have angered his teachers with his impatience, he was sent to the moon in punishment. In Japan, he is known as Gekkawo, the god of love, who ties lovers’ feet together with an invisible cord. Shamans believe they have the power to ascend to the moon and communicate with the old man – without explaining why none of them ever have, mind you. To the Inuit in Alaska the man in the moon is the keeper of all souls, while in Malaysia he is said to be sitting under a banyan tree plaiting a fishing line. A rat keeps chomping through the cord, but this is a good thing as the rat knows that if the old man ever finishes making his line then the world will end.
Back here on earth, scientists have established that the moon is not perfectly round: on one side there is a vast bump in the surface and on the opposite side a giant crater. They believe that it must have been hit by a huge asteroid many millions of years ago. It is the resultant fractures and defects in the moon’s surface that have created the shadowing effect interpreted by our ancestors as the silhouette of an old man carrying home some firewood, with his little dog alongside.