Where in the nursery rhyme does it say Humpty Dumpty is an egg?
Favorite Answer
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.
The fact 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 & Norwegian; though none is as widely known as Humpty Dumpty is in English.
Take an egg, crack it open, let the insides fall into a cup.
Now, get out some flour and water and make a paste.
Put the contents of the egg back in the shell, glue the shell together. Can you do it?
Humpty Dumpty was a colloquial term used in 15th century England to describe someone who was fat or obese – giving rise to lots of theories pertaining to the identity of Humpty Dumpty. However, in this case the question should be not Who was Humpty Dumpty but What was Humpty Dumpty? Humpty Dumpty was in fact an unusually large canon which was mounted on the protective wall of “St. Mary’s Wall Church” in Colchester, England. It was intended to protect the Parliamentarian stronghold of Colchester which was in the temporarily in control of the Royalists during the period of English history, described as the English Civil War ( 1642 – 1649). A shot from a Parliamentary canon succeeded in damaging the wall underneath Humpty Dumpty causing the canon to fall to the ground. The Royalists ‘all the King’s men’ attempted to raise Humpty Dumpty on to another part of the wall but even with the help of ‘ all the King’s horses’ failed in their task and Colchester fell to the Parliamentarians after a siege lasting eleven weeks.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.
So, they all had scrambled eggs for breakfast.
http://au.answers.yahoo.com/question/index.php?qid=1006033116230
When I taught preschool we learned the rhyme w/ the kids…One day I brought in an illustrated book, and they were all oohing and aahing and saying “Oh that’s why they coulnd put him back together, because he was an egg!!”
We just assume everyone knows that, I guess
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