Humpty Dumpty never says he is an egg, because he was a riddle
Read the nursery rhyme closely and nothing in it calls Humpty Dumpty an egg. That omission is the point: it probably began as a riddle, playing on slang for a short, clumsy person. A tumbling human might survive a fall from a wall. An egg could never be put back together.
The earliest printed version appeared in Samuel Arnold's Juvenile Amusements in 1797. A handwritten note in an 1803 copy of Mother Goose's Melody gives something close to today's words, with a different final line, and by 1842 James Orchard Halliwell was including a variant in The Nursery Rhymes of England. The familiar tune was first written down by the composer and collector James William Elliott in 1870. Structurally the rhyme is a single four-line stanza with paired rhymes and a trochaic beat, a pattern common in children's verse.
The words behind the name have a colourful history. The Oxford English Dictionary records that in the seventeenth century a humpty dumpty was a drink of brandy boiled with ale. A century later the phrase had become slang for a stubby, awkward person, and Francis Grose's 1785 dictionary of vulgar speech lists both meanings without mentioning any verse. An American writer, William Carey Richards, recalled in 1843 meeting the rhyme at age five as a puzzle whose answer was an egg. Because everyone now knows the solution, nobody poses it as a riddle any more.
Theories about a real Humpty abound. One, put forward by Katherine Elwes Thomas in 1930 and picked up by Robert Ripley, casts him as Richard III, portrayed as hunchbacked by Tudor writers and Shakespeare and defeated at Bosworth Field in 1485 despite his armies. None of these ideas is settled; the rhyme's origins remain obscure.
Similar egg riddles turn up elsewhere, including Boule Boule in France and Lille Trille in Scandinavia, but none rivals the English one in fame. Lewis Carroll made Humpty an argumentative talking egg in Through the Looking-Glass in 1871, and in America the clown George L. Fox had already turned him into a Broadway pantomime in 1868. Today the name also describes anything fragile that would be hard to rebuild once broken.
Source: Humpty Dumpty
