The Moon is made of green cheese facts for kids
"The Moon is made of green cheese" is a funny old saying. It means that someone is very easily fooled or believes something that is clearly not true.
This saying comes from old stories where a silly person sees the Moon's reflection in water. They mistake it for a big, round wheel of cheese. The phrase "green cheese" in this saying usually means a young, fresh cheese, not cheese that is actually green in color.
It's important to know that people never truly believed the Moon was made of cheese! It was always used as an example of how someone could be incredibly gullible. This meaning was well understood as far back as the 1600s.
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Stories About the Moon and Cheese
There are many old stories from different countries about a silly person who sees the Moon's reflection and thinks it's a round cheese.
For example:
- In a Serbian story, a fox tricks a wolf into thinking the Moon's reflection in the water is cheese. The wolf tries to drink all the water to get the "cheese" and bursts.
- A Zulu tale tells of a hyena that drops a bone to chase the Moon's reflection in the water.
- In a Gascon story, a farmer thinks his donkey drank the Moon when a cloud covers it. He kills the donkey to get the Moon back.
- A Turkish story features Khoja Nasru-'d-Din who thinks the Moon fell into a well. He tries to pull it out with a rope. When the rope breaks and he falls, he sees the Moon in the sky and is happy it's safe.
- A Scottish tale has a wolf trying to fish for the Moon's reflection with its tail.
The Fox, the Wolf, and the Well
One famous type of story about this idea is "The Wolf and the Fox." It was first written down in the Middle Ages by a French rabbi named Rashi.
In Rashi's story: A clever fox tricks a wolf into going to a Jewish celebration, where the wolf gets beaten. The angry wolf wants to kill the fox. But the fox says, "Come with me, and I'll give you lots of food!"
The fox leads the wolf to a well with two buckets hanging from a beam. The fox gets into the top bucket and goes down into the well. The other bucket comes up. The wolf asks, "Where are you going?" The fox points to the Moon's reflection, which looks like cheese, and says, "There's lots of meat and cheese here! Get into the other bucket and come down!"
The greedy wolf jumps into the other bucket. As the wolf goes down, the fox is pulled up out of the well. The wolf is stuck! The fox then says, "The good person gets out of trouble, and the bad person takes their place!"
This story shows how the clever fox uses the wolf's greed and the Moon's reflection to escape. Later versions of this story, like those featuring Reynard the Fox, also became very popular in Europe.
These types of stories are often grouped in folktale collections. One group is "The Wolf Dives into the Water for Reflected Cheese," where the Moon's reflection is mistaken for cheese. Another is "The Moon in the Well," where a silly person thinks the Moon itself is a real object in the water.
The Saying as a Proverb
"The Moon is made of green cheese" was a very popular saying in English books during the 1500s and 1600s. It probably started around 1546 in a book called The Proverbs of John Heywood.
A common way to use it was "to make one believe the Moon is made of green cheese." This meant to trick or hoax someone. For example, John Wilkins used it in his book The Discovery of a World in the Moone.
In French, there's a similar saying: "Il veut prendre la lune avec les dents" ("He wants to take the moon with his teeth"). This means someone wants something impossible.
This idea of people being easily fooled also appears in stories about "gothamites" – people from a silly town. For example, the Moonrakers of Wiltshire were said to have pretended to be foolish. They acted like they believed the Moon was cheese to hide their illegal smuggling activities from government officials.
What Kids Thought About the Moon
In 1902, a psychologist named G. Stanley Hall studied what children in the United States thought about the Moon. Even though most young children weren't sure what the Moon was made of, "cheese" was the most common guess!
Some children thought:
- Mice ate it into a horseshoe shape.
- You could feed it by throwing cheese up to the clouds.
- It was green because the man in the Moon ate green grass.
- Its spots were mold.
- It was really green but looked yellow because it was wrapped in yellow cheese cloth.
- It was cheese mixed with wax or melted lava.
- There were many rats, mice, and "skippers" (tiny insects) there.
- It grew big from a tiny speck of light by eating cheese.
Since then, the idea of the Moon being made of cheese has often appeared as a funny idea in children's books, cartoons, and other popular culture, especially when talking about space.
In Pop Culture
The funny idea of the Moon being made of cheese has appeared in many stories and shows.
- In the animated film A Grand Day Out, the characters Wallace and Gromit go to the Moon to get cheese because they have run out at home.
