This Is the House That Jack Built This Is the House That Jack Built "This Is the House That Jack Built" is a popular British nursery rhyme and cumulative tale. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 20584. It is Aarne–Thompson type 2035. This is perhaps the most common set of modern lyrics: Some versions use "cheese" instead of "malt", "priest" instead of "judge", "cock" instead of "rooster", the older past tense form "crew" instead of "crowed", or "chased" in place of "killed". Also in some versions the horse, the hound, and the horn are left out and the rhyme ends with the farmer. It
The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late from 1923, also subsequently included in "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil") as typical examples of Tolkien's working strategy for reconstructing philological information about sources now lost. In this case the question is: what lies behind the abbreviated version of this poem that survives as a well-known but nonsensical nursery rhyme? By imagining a text that might reasonably have left the surviving rhyme, one can deduce clues that might have left other artifacts in surviving literature. Shippey argues that many of the scenarios in Tolkien's more serious work are similar recreations ("'asterisk' poems" in Shippey's phrase), attempting to explain abstruse passages