Humpty Dumpty

History & Origin

"Humpty Dumpty" is perhaps the most famous riddle in the English nursery rhyme canon — a riddle whose answer has been so thoroughly forgotten that most people today simply take the character at face value as a large, fragile egg sitting on a wall.

The rhyme first appeared in print in 1797 in Juvenile Amusements by Samuel Arnold, and the original was a riddle: what, once broken, cannot be put back together? The answer, of course, is an egg. Humpty Dumpty was not originally described as an egg at all; that image was fixed later by John Tenniel's illustration for Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass in 1871, which has been definitive ever since.

Numerous historical allegories have been proposed — Humpty as a cannon, a cardinal, a king — but none of these theories has convincing contemporary evidence. The rhyme is most plausibly understood as a simple riddle in verse, dressed up with royal imagery (the King's horses, the King's men) to increase its gravity and grandeur.

The irreversibility of Humpty's fall gives the rhyme a melancholy undercurrent that has made it resonant well beyond the nursery. The great fall that even power and resources cannot undo is a quietly powerful image.

Our arrangement rocks it up considerably, giving Humpty the dramatic send-off his great fall deserves.