Who Said Humpty Dumpty Was An Egg!?

In Humpty Dumpty, No One Says Anything About an Egg...The Thing You Remember...Humpty Dumpty is an egg.



But Actually ...







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.

Nope. Not a single mention of an egg in the whole poem. I mean, egg or no egg, it's weird that the king's horses would even be involved in this kind of restoration project, but even that's not as strange to me as the fact that I have never once questioned Humpty Dumpty's egg status, even though it's never explicitly brought up. Going just by that poem, there's no reason to assume he's an egg; he could just be a guy who fell and cracked his skull open, which makes the king's desperate and futile attempt to "put him back together" much more tragic (and the involvement of the horses even more suspect).

"Look, Mr .... 'The King,' is it? Mr. The King, I'm admittedly out of my element here, but I'm almost certain this guy is extremely dead. Can I have some oats, please?"

Doing the least amount of research expected of me, I clicked around Wikipedia for a while to dig into old nursery rhymes and learned that the story of Humpty Dumpty actually used to be a riddle, the answer of which was "egg." When the answer to the riddle became too well-known, everyone stopped calling it a riddle and started calling it a nursery rhyme. This is an unsatisfactory answer to me for a number of reasons. For starters, that sounds like a really stupid riddle. "A thing fell off of a wall and broke -- can you guess what it was?" How is "egg" a better answer than "glass bowl named Humpty" or "a dude"?

Additionally, the whole riddle thing is just one possible theory. No one seems to know where this original riddle version of Humpty Dumpty is or where it came from, and there are competing theories that suggest that Humpty Dumpty was either a tortoise, a cannon or a stand-in for King Richard III of England, designed to make some kind of satirical observation about the king. That he was bad at sitting on walls? Wait, if Humpty Dumpty is supposed to be King Richard, who the hell is "the king" supposed to represent in this satire? This is so dumb.

It looks like we'll never know for sure whether or not Humpty Dumpty was supposed to be a stupid riddle, but we do know that we all grew up knowing, without a doubt, that the character in this brief nursery rhyme was absolutely an egg. And that's weird.


(Daniel O'Brien via cracked.com)

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