#HUMPTY DUMPTY ORIGIN SERIES#

The third idea was put forward by Professor David Daube, a professor of ancient law who wrote a series of spoof nursery rhyme histories for The Oxford Magazine in the 1950s. The first two are simply theories, based on guess-work and a knowledge of English history and linguistics. The information about these three theories comes from The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes. Richard III was defeated at Bosworth Field in 1485 and the rhyme may refer to this defeat Humpty Dumpty may have been a siege machine in the Civil War The name Humpty Dumpty may have originally referred to a person since it echoes the pet forms of the name Humphrey, which were Dump and Dumphry the original Humpty Dumpty may have been Richard III of England (1452-1485) who was depicted as a humpbacked in Tudor histories and in Shakespeare's play Richard III. There are three interesting theories about who or what Humpty Dumpty was: Four-score Men and Four-score more, Could not make Humpty Dumpty where he was before. Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. The earliest known version of the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme was published in Samuel Arnold's Juvenile Amusements in 1797 with the words: Part of the caption reads: 'Sir Humpty Dumpty fierce as Turk, At Captain Doodle runs his fork.' Does this make it more likely that Humpty Dumpty was originally a real person? The earliest reference to Humpty Dumpty as a comical character appears in the caption to an engraving in a book published sometime between 17. Was the rhyme already so old and so well-known by then that the drink was named for the rhyme? We do know that the term Humpty Dumpty was given to a boiled ale-and-brandy drink from the end of the seventeenth century. It does not appear in early riddle books but it is thought that this might be because it was already too well-known for authors to bother with. The rhyme does not explicitly state that Humpty Dumpty is an egg and perhaps this was the point of the original riddle: to guess what Humpty Dumpty was.Īccording to the Opies, students of linguistics believe the rhyme is so old that its age 'is to be measured in thousands of years, or rather it is so great that it cannot be measured at all' (p.252). Iona and Peter Opie, in their wonderful book The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, note that nursery rhymes were often riddles and that it's possible that Humpty Dumpty was also originally a riddle.

Humpty dumpty origin