Was Humpty Dumpty Always an Egg?

on earth was the monarchy involved? And why couldn't they put the poor guy back together? Furthermore, is he an egg? In popular culture today, Humpty Dumpty is almost always portrayed as an anthropomorphic egg. He has legs and arms coming off of his large egg body slash head, and he's wearing clothing. But the poem doesn't say the Humpty is an egg. The thing is this poem was probably originally intended to be a riddle. If you can't put him

back together after a fall, what is he? An answer is that he's an egg, which is part and parcel of modern portrayals. A spoiler alert Okay. The Humpty Dumpty rhyme first appeared in seventeen ninety seven in a book called Juvenile Amusement written by one Samuel Arnold. In the original, the first two lines were the same, but the last two lines read four score men and four score more.

Could not make Humpty Dumpty where he was before. It's not really material here, but a score is twenty men, so this means eighty plus eighty or one hundred and sixty men total. Anyway. There have been a few other variations since then, but they all amount to about the same thing. Humpty falls best efforts can't set him right. Certainly, the exact wording could influence the answer of the riddle.

The original I'd have referred to a famous historical person, and other versions that talk about being unable to set Humpty upright again might refer to a different creature, like maybe a tortoise. An illustration from eighteen oh three in Mother Goose's Melody portrays him as a normal, non egg human boy. So why is Humpty so firmly an egg today? Blame Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass and what Alice found there. The sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland a

first published in eighteen seventy one. The book devotes a whole chapter to Humpty Dumpty. But here's the passage where Alice first comes upon him. The egg only got larger and larger, and more and more human. When she had come within a few yards of it, she saw that it had eyes and a nose and a mouth. And when she had come close to it, she saw clearly that it was Humpty Dumpty himself. It can't be anybody else, she said to herself. I'm as certain of it as

if his name were written all over his face. Then refers to Humpty as looking like an egg. Allowed, and he's very offended. At any rate, a humanoid egg fits right in with the story's surreal cast of characters. But this was the first time Humpty Dumpty was depicted as the character that we're familiar with today, complete with an image by the book's illustrator, John Tenniel. The Alice books were and remain popular, and future illustrators of the nursery

rhyme have often paid homage to Tenniel's depiction of the character. Okay, so we know why he's an egg today, But was he always an egg? What was the inspiration for this riddle in the first place. Let's go back even further. The first known appearance of the term humpty dumpty in print was in sixteen ninety in a slang dictionary, where it's defined as a drink being ale boiled with brandy. There's no real explanation for this slang term, although strong

beer was sometimes called hum around that time. Also, so if you think this drink sounds gross, there's no accounting for taste. But there were a lot of warm beer or wine plus liquor cocktails happening back then. Skipping ahead to seventeen eighty five, one Francis Gross noted in his book A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue that the term could refer to either the drink or to a short,

clumsy person, which is sort of getting somewhere, okay. In eighteen forty two, a Punch magazine, a popular British satire publication, claimed that Humpty was a symbol for Cardinal Thomas Walsey, who was appointed in eighteen fifteen during King Henry the Eighth's reign. Their claim was meant to be funny, but

it's not totally implausible. Wallsy apparently enjoyed sitting on the walls of the high tower of Cowwood Castle in York, and he notably fell from grace with King Henry for not obtaining the Pope's permission for the king to divorce his first wife and Mary Anne Boilen. Wallsey was ultimately arrested by the King's men. Another theory, with perhaps a few cracks in it, is that Humpty Dumpty is an

allusion to King Richard the Third. Richard has often been depicted as having a grotesquely rounded, hunched back, partially because of negative propaganda in Shakespeare's play about him. The Bard's patron at the time was one Fernando Stanley, who was a direct descendant of one of Richard's enemies, so it's no wonder that in the play insults are hurled about

him like that he's a poisonous, bunch backed toad. In reality, we now know, after his remains were found buried under a parking lot in twenty twelve, that Richard only had scoliosis mild enough that it would have made one shoulder sit a bit higher than the other back to Humpty Dumpty. Though Richard was killed in the Battle of Bosworth in fourteen eighty five, kicking off the reign of the Tudors.

It's claimed that Richard the Third's horse was named Wall, and that Richard died after falling off of Wall and being attacked beyond, and no matter what his men tried to do. Yet another theory is absolutely untrue. It was written up in a spoof article in Oxford Magazine in the nineteen fifties, but it wound up gaining popularity. It purported that Humpty Dumpty was in fact a cannon that was used in Colchester, England, in sixteen forty eight to

defend against a siege during the English Civil War. As with many towns at the time, Colchester's castle, churches and village were surrounded by a protective stone wall. The forces defending the town put a cannon on top of the church tower at Saint Mary's at the Walls Church and nicknamed the cannon Humpty Dumpty. When it came under fire by Parliamentary armies, the tower toppled and the cannon was destroyed and couldn't be put back together again again. That

one's a definite spoof. It seems that Humpty Dumpty has some secrets in that egghead of his after all these years, but his legend lives on characters like Humpty, Alexander Dumpty in the film Puts in Boots, and the albeit minor batman villain Humphrey Dumpler, whose attempts to fix things that he perceives as broken always and in disaster. Today's episode is based on the article was Humpty Dumpty really an egg?

On how Stuffworks dot Com? Written by Rebecca Treon. Brain Stuff is production of by Heart Radio in partnership with how Stuffworks dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,