Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff,
Lauren Vogelbaum. Here we need to talk about Humpty Dumpty.
You may well have grown up with this nursery rhyme,
but just in case, let's review it goes. Humpty Dumpty
sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
(00:21):
All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't
put Humpty together again. It's a simple verse, but there's
a lot going on here. Who is this Humpty character?
Why was he sitting and why did he fall? Why
on earth was the monarchy involved? And why couldn't they
put the poor guy back together? Furthermore, is he an egg?
(00:46):
In popular culture today, Humpty Dumpty is almost always portrayed
as an anthropomorphic egg. He has legs and arms coming
off of his large egg body slash head, and he's
wearing clothing. But the poem doesn't say the Humpty is
an egg. The thing is this poem was probably originally
intended to be a riddle. If you can't put him
(01:08):
back together after a fall, what is he? An answer
is that he's an egg, which is part and parcel
of modern portrayals. A spoiler alert Okay. The Humpty Dumpty
rhyme first appeared in seventeen ninety seven in a book
called Juvenile Amusement written by one Samuel Arnold. In the original,
(01:28):
the first two lines were the same, but the last
two lines read four score men and four score more.
Could not make Humpty Dumpty where he was before. It's
not really material here, but a score is twenty men,
so this means eighty plus eighty or one hundred and
sixty men total. Anyway. There have been a few other
variations since then, but they all amount to about the
(01:50):
same thing. Humpty falls best efforts can't set him right. Certainly,
the exact wording could influence the answer of the riddle.
The original I'd have referred to a famous historical person,
and other versions that talk about being unable to set
Humpty upright again might refer to a different creature, like
maybe a tortoise. An illustration from eighteen oh three in
(02:12):
Mother Goose's Melody portrays him as a normal, non egg
human boy. So why is Humpty so firmly an egg today?
Blame Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass and what Alice
found there. The sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland a
first published in eighteen seventy one. The book devotes a
whole chapter to Humpty Dumpty. But here's the passage where
(02:35):
Alice first comes upon him. The egg only got larger
and larger, and more and more human. When she had
come within a few yards of it, she saw that
it had eyes and a nose and a mouth. And
when she had come close to it, she saw clearly
that it was Humpty Dumpty himself. It can't be anybody else,
she said to herself. I'm as certain of it as
if his name were written all over his face. Then
(03:00):
refers to Humpty as looking like an egg. Allowed, and
he's very offended. At any rate, a humanoid egg fits
right in with the story's surreal cast of characters. But
this was the first time Humpty Dumpty was depicted as
the character that we're familiar with today, complete with an
image by the book's illustrator, John Tenniel. The Alice books
(03:20):
were and remain popular, and future illustrators of the nursery
rhyme have often paid homage to Tenniel's depiction of the character. Okay,
so we know why he's an egg today, But was
he always an egg? What was the inspiration for this
riddle in the first place. Let's go back even further.
The first known appearance of the term humpty dumpty in
(03:43):
print was in sixteen ninety in a slang dictionary, where
it's defined as a drink being ale boiled with brandy.
There's no real explanation for this slang term, although strong
beer was sometimes called hum around that time. Also, so
if you think this drink sounds gross, there's no accounting
for taste. But there were a lot of warm beer
(04:05):
or wine plus liquor cocktails happening back then. Skipping ahead
to seventeen eighty five, one Francis Gross noted in his
book A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue that the
term could refer to either the drink or to a short,
clumsy person, which is sort of getting somewhere, okay. In
(04:26):
eighteen forty two, a Punch magazine, a popular British satire publication,
claimed that Humpty was a symbol for Cardinal Thomas Walsey,
who was appointed in eighteen fifteen during King Henry the
Eighth's reign. Their claim was meant to be funny, but
it's not totally implausible. Wallsy apparently enjoyed sitting on the
walls of the high tower of Cowwood Castle in York,
(04:49):
and he notably fell from grace with King Henry for
not obtaining the Pope's permission for the king to divorce
his first wife and Mary Anne Boilen. Wallsey was ultimately
arrested by the King's men. Another theory, with perhaps a
few cracks in it, is that Humpty Dumpty is an
allusion to King Richard the Third. Richard has often been
(05:10):
depicted as having a grotesquely rounded, hunched back, partially because
of negative propaganda in Shakespeare's play about him. The Bard's
patron at the time was one Fernando Stanley, who was
a direct descendant of one of Richard's enemies, so it's
no wonder that in the play insults are hurled about
him like that he's a poisonous, bunch backed toad. In reality,
(05:32):
we now know, after his remains were found buried under
a parking lot in twenty twelve, that Richard only had
scoliosis mild enough that it would have made one shoulder
sit a bit higher than the other back to Humpty Dumpty.
Though Richard was killed in the Battle of Bosworth in
fourteen eighty five, kicking off the reign of the Tudors.
(05:52):
It's claimed that Richard the Third's horse was named Wall,
and that Richard died after falling off of Wall and
being attacked beyond, and no matter what his men tried
to do. Yet another theory is absolutely untrue. It was
written up in a spoof article in Oxford Magazine in
the nineteen fifties, but it wound up gaining popularity. It
(06:14):
purported that Humpty Dumpty was in fact a cannon that
was used in Colchester, England, in sixteen forty eight to
defend against a siege during the English Civil War. As
with many towns at the time, Colchester's castle, churches and
village were surrounded by a protective stone wall. The forces
defending the town put a cannon on top of the
(06:35):
church tower at Saint Mary's at the Walls Church and
nicknamed the cannon Humpty Dumpty. When it came under fire
by Parliamentary armies, the tower toppled and the cannon was
destroyed and couldn't be put back together again again. That
one's a definite spoof. It seems that Humpty Dumpty has
some secrets in that egghead of his after all these years,
(06:58):
but his legend lives on characters like Humpty, Alexander Dumpty
in the film Puts in Boots, and the albeit minor
batman villain Humphrey Dumpler, whose attempts to fix things that
he perceives as broken always and in disaster. Today's episode
is based on the article was Humpty Dumpty really an egg?
(07:20):
On how Stuffworks dot Com? Written by Rebecca Treon. Brain
Stuff is production of by Heart Radio in partnership with
how Stuffworks dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang.
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