Humpty Dumpty – A Good Egg?

As a child, you have faith that nursery rhymes will be straight with you. To wit:

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.

Seems straightforward enough. Just about every book of nursery rhymes with that poem shows an anthropomorphic egg sitting on the imposing partition before ending up as a shattered shell and soon-to-be-omelet at the foot of the wall.

Lies!

While the rhyme may or may not be a riddle, the fact remains that nowhere does it say that the unfortunate Humpty is, in fact, an egg. Why not, say, a drink? Even if you have a lot of glue (from the horses? eww), a good wet-dry vacuum, and royal lackeys who are quick as lightning, it’s unlikely that they’ll be able to set up the shattered vessel and spilled liquid exactly as they were before.

Or, what if Humpty is some adventuresome soul who ignored all the king’s decrees that said wall not be climbed and sat upon? It seems this warning was not issued without reason, as the wall-sitter finds out to eir un-togethered conclusion after gravity has its way — medicine having its limitations in these circumstances.

Regardless of the underlying cause of injury — which, to be fair, isn’t the fall but the sudden stop from said fall — the fact remains that at no point does the poem specifically mention an egg. Despite the fanciful illustrations, despite parental assurances, and despite the psychedelic descriptions from Lewis Carroll the end result is my Humpty illusion laying shattered on the ground like a Christmas tree ornament the cat’s gotten to.