Humpty Dumpty

This is about the nursery rhyme. For other meanings, see Humpty Dumpty (disambiguation).

Humpty Dumpty sits on a wall, not yet having fallen.

Humpty Dumpty is a character in a Mother Goose rhyme portrayed as an anthropomorphized egg. Most English-speaking children are familiar with the rhyme:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

All the king's horses and all the king's men

Couldn't put Humpty together again.

That Humpty Dumpty is an egg is not actually stated in the rhyme. In its first printed form, in 1810, it is a riddle, and exploits for misdirection the fact that "humpty dumpty" was 18th-Century reduplicative slang for a short, clumsy person. Whereas a clumsy person falling off a wall would not be irreparably damaged, an egg would be. The rhyme is no longer posed as a riddle, since the answer is now so well known. Similar riddles have been recorded by folklorists in other languages, such as Boule Boule in French, or Lille Trille in Swedish; though none is as widely known as Humpty Dumpty is in English.

Origins

Previous to the "short, clumsy person" meaning, "humpty dumpty" referred to a drink of brandy boiled with ale. There are also various theories of an original "Humpty Dumpty", who was not an egg. Most, if not all, of these must be classified as false etymologies.

• According to an insert taken from the East Anglia Tourist Board in England, Humpty Dumpty was a powerful cannon during the English Civil War. It was mounted on top of the St Mary's at the Wall Church in Colchester defending the city against siege in the summer of 1648. Although Colchester was a Royalist stronghold, it was besieged by the Roundheads for 11 weeks before finally falling. The church tower was hit by enemy cannon fire and the top of the tower was blown off, sending "Humpty" tumbling to the ground. Naturally all the King's horses and all the King's men (Royalist cavalry and infantry respectively) tried to mend "him" but in vain. Other reports have Humpty Dumpty referring to a sniper nicknamed One-Eyed Thompson, who occupied the same church tower.

Visitors to Colchester can see the reconstructed Church tower as they reach the top of Balkerne Hill on the left hand side of the road. An extended version of the rhyme gives additional verses, including the following:

In Sixteen Hundred and Forty-Eight

When England suffered the pains of state

The Roundheads lay siege to Colchester town

Where the King's men still fought for the crown

There One-Eyed Thompson stood on the wall

A gunner of deadliest aim of all

From St. Mary's Tower his cannon he fired

Humpty-Dumpty was its name...

• In another theory, Humpty Dumpty referred to King Richard III of England, the hunchbacked monarch, the "Wall" being either the name of his horse (called "White Surrey" in Shakespeare's play), or a reference to the supporters who deserted him. During the battle of Bosworth Field, he fell off his steed and was said to have been "hacked into pieces". (However, although the play depicts Richard as a hunchback, other historical evidence suggests that he was not.)

• The story of Cardinal Wolsey's downfall is depicted in the children's nursery rhyme of Humpty Dumpty. At length Cawood Castle (Cawood, a village in Yorkshire, seven miles southwest of York) passed to Cardinal Wolsey, who let it fall into disrepair in the early part of his career (1514 – 1530), due to his residence at the Court, devotion to temporal affairs and his neglect of his diocesan duties. King Henry VIII sent Wolsey back home in 1523 after he failed to obtain a divorce from the Pope – a huge mistake on Wolsey’s part. Wolsey returned to the castle and began to restore it to its former grandeur. However, he was arrested for high treason in November, 1530 and ordered to London for trial. He left on 6 November, but took ill at Leicester and died in the Abbey there on 29 November.

References in popular culture

Humpty Dumpty and Alice. From Through the Looking Glass. Illustration by John Tenniel.

Humpty Dumpty, shown as a riddle with answer, in a 1902 Mother Goose story book by William Wallace Denslow

Denslow shows the result of the fall

Humpty appears in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, where he discusses semantics and pragmatics with Alice.

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."

Among other things, he (mis-)explains the difficult words from Jabberwocky. See Humpty Dumptyism.

In L. Frank Baum's Mother Goose in Prose, the rhyming riddle is devised by the daughter of the King, having witnessed Humpty's death and her father's soldiers' efforts to save him.

Tori Amos wrote a song named Humpty Dumpty which uses the poem as lyrics.

Counting Crows have a song called "Einstein on the Beach (For An Eggman)" in which the chorus references Humpty-Dumpty: "And all the king's men reappear / For an eggman, on and off the wall / Who'll never be together again..."

The title of Robert Penn Warren's novel All the King's Men derives from the nursery rhyme, as does the title of Woodward and Bernstein's Watergate memoir All the President's Men.

All the King's Men is also the title of a children's opera by Richard Rodney Bennett. Set in the time of the English Civil War it describes the invention of a machine similar to the Roman testudo (see below) which the troops on both sides in the Gloucester siege christened "Humpty-Dumpty".

Also, Aimee Mann wrote a song named Humpty Dumpty, in which the last verses are a romantic adaptation of the original poem ("All the king horses and all the kings men/ Couldn't put baby together again").

Neil Gaiman published in Knave, in 1984 a short story called 'The Case of the Four and Twenty Blackbirds', which casts Humpty as a murder victim. The tone is that of hard boiled detective fiction and casts a number of nursery rhyme characters in various roles such as Jill from Jack and Jill as the femme fatale or Cock Robin as the underworld informant. It is now available to read from his website.

Jasper Fforde includes Humpty Dumpty in two of his novels. One, The Well of Lost Plots, the third novel in his Thursday Next series, features Humpty as the ringleader of dissatisfied nursery rhyme characters threatening to strike. The other, The Big Over Easy sets Humpty as the victim of a murder under investigation by Detective Inspector Jack Spratt and his partner Detective Sergeant Mary Mary.

Robert Rankin includes Humpty Dumpty as one victim of a serial fairy tale character murderer investigated by Bill Winkie, Private Eye and sidekick Eddie Bear the Teddy Bear, in his novel "The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse"

Humpty makes a cameo in American McGee's Alice, where he is half-broken and smoking a cigar. His role in the game is to point Alice to the location of the Blunderbuss.

In Todd McFarlane's 'Twisted Fairy Tales' line, Humpty Dumpty is not an egg, but a huge fat creature wearing a propellor beanie, with entrails leaking from his body and stitches and staples to 'fix' him.

Frank Beddor said in an interview that Humpty Dumpty will probably be in his third Looking Glass Wars book.

Humpty Dumpty also appears in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake as a symbol of the fall of all men.

There is also a song by Travis (Scottish band) which is called "The Humpty Dumpty Love Song". The first lines of it are "All of the king's horses and all of the king's men couldn't put my heart back together again".Taken from their third studio album The Invisible Band (2001) There is another Travis Song called "Coming Around". In the video, there is the singer Fran Healy in an egg and by the end of it he falls from a wall.

In Fantasy Flight Games Grimm RPG of twisted fairy tales he features as Humpty Dumpty aka. "The Rotten King". A smelly ruler over an evil kingdom of monsters who enjoys nothing more than pitting children against each other in cruel games.

The Prog rock band Genesis has a song named Squonk, from their 1976 album A Trick of the Tail, which features the line "All the king's horses and all the king's men could never put a smile on that face".

Humpty Dumpty features prominently in City of Glass by Paul Auster. The character Peter Stillman, while cracking open a boiled egg, uses the example of Humpty Dumpty to explain his theories about language.

Eggorny is a Colombian cartoon, which is about Humpty Dumpty. It takes place in a mediæval landscape. After his great fall, no one was able to put Humpty together again until some 1500 years later. A teenager named Rufus put him together again, and renamed him Eggorny. Eggorny now lives in the modern-day town of Someville.

The British jazz-funk group Central Line name-checked Humpty Dumpty in their 1981 club hit "You Know You Can Do It" ("Not like Humpty / Don't come tumbling down / Into pieces on the ground")

60's rock band The Monkees has a song called "All The King's Horses" with the chorus singing "All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put my broken heart back together again."

Humpty Dumpty is also a minor character in the first story arc of the comic book Jack of Fables, in which he remembers the Battle at Colchester, and actually fires as a cannon once before cracking up.

On Nov. 6th, 2006, NPR's All Things Considered used the nursery rhyme to demonstrate the talents of voice-over artists Dennis Steele and Scott Sander. Their voices are both recognizeable as narrators for political season TV advertisements. In a "Dire and Disastrous" tone the rhyme was lampooned as, "Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All our Federal Tax Dollars could not put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Humpty Dumpty...Wrong on wall-sitting."

Ricky Gervais, comedian and producer of both the British and American versions of the television show "The Office," ranted about Humpty Dumpty in his stage show, "Politics."

Boston-based band The Receiving End of Sirens uses the lyrics "Bring all the king's horses and all the king's men" in their song "The War of All Against All".

Olivier Blanchard and Michael Kremer close their 1997 paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics entitled "Disorganization" with a phrase from the rhyme.

In Cardcaptor Sakura Tomoyo is Humpty Dumpty during Sakura's trip into "Alice in wonderland".

Application in cognitive science

A phonetic variation composed of near-sounding French words of the rhyme is also used in the fields of systems analysis, knowledge management, and requirements management in software development to illustrate the complexity of human communications. It is useful in bilingual or near-bilingual environments to show the issues involved in crossing over from the oral world typical of implicit knowledge to the written world of explicit knowledge.

One of the many variations is thus:

Homme petit d'homme petit, s'attend, n'avale

Homme petit d'homme petit, à degrés de bègues folles

Anal deux qui noeuds ours, anal deux qui noeuds s'y mènent

Coup d'un poux tome petit tout guetteur à gaine

If this is read out slowly (by somebody who has a good enough knowledge of French to pronounce it properly, but has not been told a nursery rhyme is involved) to an audience of persons who have been warned a nursery rhyme is involved, the reader would be rather bemused and the listeners would very rapidly recognize the nursery rhyme. Reading the passage aloud will make the effect clear.

A literal translation of the French words (by somebody with a good knowledge of French, and a moderate knowledge of English but no knowledge of the nursery rhyme) would come out thus:

Little man of little man, waits for himself, does not swallow

Little man of little man, by degrees of stuttering madwomen

Anal two that knots bears, anal two that leads

Strike from a louse small volume any watchman with a girdle

See also: Mondegreen and Animutation

External links

• Why is Humpty Dumpty portrayed as an egg? — from The Straight Dope
• Humpty Dumpty — Various suggested origins
• The Canon of the Cannon
• Humpty Dumpty Illustrations and the Reality of Text — Paper discussing the emergence of the "egg" interpretation
• Eggorny, a colombian cartoon about Humpty Dumpty Spanish page
• Humpty Dumpty and the fall of Colchester An Animated and Narrated version of the Origins of the Humpty Dumpty