Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son "Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son" is a popular English language nursery rhyme. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 19621. Modern versions of the rhyme include: The 'pig' mentioned in the song is almost certainly not a live animal but rather a kind of pastry, often made with an apple filling, smaller than a pie. Another version of the rhyme is: This rhyme is often conflated with a separate and longer rhyme: Both rhymes were first printed separately in a "Tom the Piper's Son", a chapbook produced around 1795 in London, England. The
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