There are two halves to my reply. The first is off the top of my head.

The thing that I couldn’t understand as a child (and still can’t) is why Humpty Dumpty is pictured as an *egg*, of all things. Nowhere does it say (in the text) that he’s an egg, so why did he become an egg?

And of course the king’s horses couldn’t help put him back together again. In fact, if I was asked to name a perfect egg-crushing tool I might even choose a horse’s hoof. The assumption that they could help was woefully misguided. 🙂

My memory tells me that the story was about Humphrey Dumpton (or something like this), who was some kind of royal protester or rebel and who was murdered by being pushed off the castle walls. I wonder if I’m right.

Now I’m going to look up the origins of Humpty Dumpty and come back to this post in a few minutes.

I’m back.

Wow. There is *a lot* of information about Humphrey Dumpty on the Web!

There are continental variations of the same rhyme: “Boule Boule” in French, “Lille Trille” in Swedish and Norwegian and (my personal favourites) “Runtzelken-Puntzelken” or “Humpelken-Pumpelken” in different parts of Germany; although none is as widely known as Humpty Dumpty is in English.

From various sources:

“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, 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.”

So… what I learned in childhood was sort of in the right area, just about, but there’s no mention of anyone named Humphrey.

“Humpty Dumpty has been used to demonstrate the second law of thermodynamics. The law describes a process known as entropy, a measure of the number of specific ways in which a system may be arranged, often taken to be a measure of “disorder”. The higher the entropy, the higher the disorder. After his fall, and subsequent shattering, the inability to put him together again is representative of this principle, as it would be highly unlikely, though not impossible, to return him to his earlier state of lower entropy, as the entropy of an isolated system never decreases.”

Now we’re just being silly. 🙂

“There is speculation that the nursery rhyme had an underlying meaning – in which Humpty Dumpty represents King Richard III of England and the wall his horse. Others have suggested that it refers to the downfall of Cardinal Wolsey at the hand of King Henry VIII.”

No Humphrey anywhere! I was lied to!

I think your game would work really well as a wiki, Maha.

Recently I’ve been watching a Japanese show from the 70s called “Monkey”. It was on on Friday evenings when I was a boy (BBC 2 if I remember correctly) and I went through a nostalgic phase when I turned 40 and bought it again on DVD.

The point is… Monkey (the lead character) was born on a mountainside, in an egg (naturally). He got a bit cocky with his language and behaviour (there’s a bit of a bust-up in Heaven), so the gods imprison him in rock for about 900 years. Now, released, he has to accompany a boy priest from China to India (on horseback) for a pilgrimage (although the boy priest is played by a girl). Monkey is a monkey in a man’s body. His other companions are a pig in a man’s body (Pigsy) and a cannibal-cum-sea monster in a man’s body, inexplicably named Sandy.

All of this is based on Japanese folklore and history.

And I thought *our* old stories were odd enough!

(And I doubt I’ve answered your question!)