Humpty Dumpty
From Free net encyclopedia
- This is about the nursery rhyme. For other meanings, see Humpty Dumpty (disambiguation).
Humpty Dumpty is a character in a Mother Goose rhyme, portrayed as an anthropomorphized egg. Most English-speaking children are familiar with the rhyme:
- 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.
That Humpty Dumpty is an egg is not actually stated in the rhyme (and there is some debate about this: see Origins below). Its original form was probably as a riddle, exploiting for misdirection the fact that "humpty dumpty" was 17th-Century reduplicative slang for a short, clumsy person. Whereas a clumsy person falling off a wall would not be irreperably damaged, an egg would be. The rhyme is no longer posed as a riddle, since the answer is now so well known.
Contents |
Exploitation
Image:Humpty Dumpty Tenniel.jpg
Humpty appears in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, where he discusses semantics and pragmatics with Alice.
- "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."
Among other things, he (mis-)explains the difficult words from Jabberwocky. See Humpty Dumptyism.
In L. Frank Baum's Mother Goose in Prose, the rhyming riddle is devised by the daughter of the King, having witnessed Humpty's death and her father's soldiers' efforts to save him.
Tori Amos wrote a song named Humpty Dumpty which uses the poem as lyrics.
The title of Robert Penn Warren's novel All the King's Men derives from the nursery rhyme.
Also, Aimee Mann wrote a song named Humpty Dumpty, in which the last verses are a romantic adaptation of the original poem ("All the king horses and all the kings men/ Couldn't put baby together again").
Neil Gaiman published in KNAVE, in 1984 a short story called 'The Case of the Four and Twenty Blackbirds', which casts Humpty as a murder victim. The tone is that of hard boiled detective fiction and casts a number of nursery rhyme charaters in various roles such as Jill from Jack and Jill as the femme fatale or Cock Robin as the underworld informant. It is now available to read from his website.
Jasper Fforde includes Humpty Dumpty in two of his novels. One, The Well of Lost Plots, the third novel in his Thursday Next series, features Humpty as the ringleader of dissatisfied nursery rhyme characters threatening to strike. The other, The Big Over Easy sets Humpty as the victim of a murder under investigation by Detective Inspector Jack Spratt and his partner Mary Mary.
Humpty makes a cameo in American McGee's Alice, where he is half-broken and smoking a cigar. His role in the game is to point Alice to the location of the Blunderbuss.
In Todd McFarlane's 'Twisted Fairy Tales' line, Humpty Dumpty is not an egg, but a huge fat creature wearing a propellor beanie, with entrails leaking from his body and stitches and staples to 'fix' him.
Frank Beddor said in an interview that Humpty Dumpty will probably be in his third Looking Glass Wars book.
Humpty Dumpty also appears in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake as a symbol of the fall of all men.
There is also a song by Travis (Scottish band) which is called "The Humpty Dumpty Love Song". The first lines of it are "All of the king's horses and all of the king's men couldn't put my heart back together again". There is another Travis Song called "Coming Around". In the video, there is the singer Fran Healy in an egg and by the end of it he falls from a wall.
In Fantasy Flight Games Grimm RPG of twisted fairy tales he features as Humpty Dumpty aka. "The Rotten King". A smelly ruler over an evil kingdom of monsters who enjoys nothing more than pitting children against each other in cruel games.
The Prog rock band Genesis (band) has a song named Squonk, from their 1976 album A Trick of the Tail, which features the line "All the king's horses and all the king's men could never put a smile on that face".
Origins
There are various apocryphal theories of an original "Humpty Dumpty", who was not an egg:
- According to an insert taken from the East Anglia Tourist Board in England, Humpty Dumpty was a powerful cannon during the English Civil War. It was mounted on top of the St Mary's at the Wall Church in Colchester defending the city against siege in the summer of 1648. Although Colchester was a Royalist stronghold, it beseiged by the Roundheads for 11 weeks before finally falling. The church tower was hit by enemy cannon fire and the top of the tower was blown off, sending "Humpty" tumbling to the ground. Naturally all the King's horses and all the King's men (Royalist cavalry and infantry respectively) tried to mend "him" but in vain. Other reports have Humpty Dumpty refering to a sniper nicknamed One-Eyed Thompson, who occupied the same church tower.
Visitors to Colchester can see the reconstructed Church tower as they reach the top of Balkerne Hill on the left hand side of the road. An extended version of the rhyme gives additional verses, including the following:
- In Sixteen Hundred and Forty-Eight
- When England suffered the pains of state
- The Roundheads lay siege to Colchester town
- Where the King's men still fought for the crown
- There One-Eyed Thompson stood on the wall
- A gunner of deadliest aim
- From St. Mary's Tower his cannon he fired
- Humpty-Dumpty was its name...
- In another theory, Humpty Dumpty referred to King Richard III of England, the hunchbacked monarch, the "Wall" being either the name of his horse, or a reference to the supporters who deserted him. During the battle of Bosworth Field, he fell off of his steed and was said to have been "hacked into pieces". (However, although Shakespeare's play depicts Richard as a hunchback, other historical evidence suggests that he was not.)
- Humpty Dumpty may also refer to a Roman war machine called a Testudo used to cross moats and climb over castle walls. Humpty Dumpty refers to the turtle-like look of the machine and the noise of the wheels.
Application in cognitive science
A phonetic variation composed of near-sounding French words of the rhyme is also used in the fields of systems analysis, knowledge management, and requirements management in software development to illustrate the complexity of human communications. It is useful in bilingual or near-bilingual environments to show the issues involved in crossing over from the oral world typical of implicit knowledge to the written world of explicit knowledge.
One of the many variations is thus:
- Homme petit d'homme petit, s'attend, n'avale
- Homme petit d'homme petit, à degrés de bègues folles
- Anal deux qui noeuds ours, anal deux qui noeuds s'y mènent
- Coup d'un poux tome petit tout guetteur à gaine
If this is read out slowly (by somebody who has a good enough knowledge of French to pronounce it properly, but has not been told a nursery rhyme is involved) to an audience of persons who have been warned a nursery rhyme is involved, the reader would be rather bemused and the listeners would very rapidly recognize the nursery rhyme. Reading the passage aloud will make the effect clear.
A literal translation of the French words (by somebody with a good knowledge of French, and a moderate knowledge of English but no knowledge of the nursery rhyme) would come out thus:
- Little man of little man, waits for himself, does not swallow
- Little man of little man, by degrees of stuttering madwomen
- Anal two that knots bears, anal two that leads
- Strike from a louse small volume any watchman with a girdle
External references
- Why is Humpty Dumpty portrayed as an egg? — from The Straight Dope
- Humpty Dumpty — various suggested originsde:Humpty Dumpty