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Rookie
Lv 5
Rookie asked in Arts & HumanitiesPhilosophy · 7 years ago

Who is Humpty Dumpty?

What is this nursery rhyme really about?

"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."

Is it about some king having a nervous breakdown??????

8 Answers

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  • 7 years ago
    Favorite Answer

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humpty_Dumpty

    Meaning

    "The rhyme does not explicitly state that the subject is an egg, possibly because it may have been originally posed as a riddle.[1] There are also various theories of an original "Humpty Dumpty". One, advanced by Katherine Elwes Thomas in 1930[9] and adopted by Robert Ripley,[1] posits that Humpty Dumpty is King Richard III of England, depicted in Tudor histories, and particularly in Shakespeare's play, as humpbacked and who was defeated, despite his armies at Bosworth Field in 1485. However, the term "humpback" was not recorded until the eighteenth century, and no direct evidence linking the rhyme with the historical figure has been advanced.[10]

    The suggestion that Humpty Dumpty was a "tortoise" siege engine, an armoured frame, used unsuccessfully to approach the walls of the Parliamentary held city of Gloucester in 1643 during the Siege of Gloucester in the English Civil War, was put forward in 1956 by Professor David Daube in The Oxford Magazine of February 16, 1956, on the basis of a contemporary account of the attack, but without evidence that the rhyme was connected.[11] The theory, part of an anonymous series of articles on the origin of nursery rhymes, was widely acclaimed in academia,[12] but was derided by others as "ingenuity for ingenuity's sake" and declared to be a spoof.[13][14] The link was nevertheless popularised by a children's opera All the King's Men by Richard Rodney Bennett, first performed in 1969.[15][16]

    From 1996 the website of the Colchester tourist board attributed the origin of the rhyme to a cannon recorded as used from the church of St Mary-at-the-Wall by the Royalist defenders in the siege of 1648.[17] In 1648 Colchester was a walled town with a castle and several churches and was protected by the city wall. The story given was that a large cannon, which the website claimed was colloquially called Humpty Dumpty, was strategically placed on the wall. A shot from a Parliamentary cannon succeeded in damaging the wall beneath Humpty Dumpty which caused the cannon to tumble to the ground. The Royalists, or Cavaliers, "all the King's men", attempted to raise Humpty Dumpty on to another part of the wall, but because the cannon was so heavy "All the King's horses and all the King's men couldn't put Humpty together again". In his 2008 book Pop Goes the Weasel: The Secret Meanings of Nursery Rhymes author Albert Jack claimed that there were two other verses supporting this claim.[18] Elsewhere he claimed to have found them in an "old dusty library, [in] an even older book",[19] but did not state what the book was or where it was found. It has been pointed out that the two additional verses are not in the style of the seventeenth century, or the existing rhyme, and that they do not fit with the earliest printed version of the rhyme, which do not mention horses and men.[17]..."

  • 7 years ago

    Humpty Dumpty is the old world monarchy after the French Revolution. He sat on the castle wall of the dark ages, for centuries. The Revolution(s) toppled his regime by throwing him off the wall. His fall is so permanent that "all the King's horses, all the King's men" haven't the power to save him.

  • Anonymous
    7 years ago

    You can find answers to questions like these in "The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes." Your library probably has it. Look up Humpty Dumpty in that book and, if there is an allegorical meaning (like a political issue or whatever) it will give you the details.

  • 7 years ago

    It was the name of a large cannon on top of a castle or fortress wall they over loaded it and it exploded and fell off the wall that’s why they couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again

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  • 7 years ago

    Humpty Dumpty Humptied a tree..

    Source(s): Prior Experiences
  • ?
    Lv 7
    7 years ago

    Dumpty means plumb with social advancement. Humpty is a kind of attitude, like "humph! What have we here?" A sort of superiority.

    Those who have attained a level of social fatness and arrogance have a comeuppance coming that kings and soldiers cannot protect them from.

    Simple.

  • Anonymous
    7 years ago

    It's about an egg that falls off a wall :)

  • 7 years ago

    idk

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