Tuesday 11 January 2011

Humpty Dumpty (Revisited)

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.[1]

Origins
The rhyme does not explicitly state that the subject is an egg because it probably was originally posed as a riddle.[1] The earliest known version is in a manuscript addition to a copy of Mother Goose's Melody published in 1803, which has the modern version with a different last line: "Could not set Humpty Dumpty up again".[1] It was first published in 1810 in a version of Gammer Gurton's Garland as:

Humpty Dumpty sate [sic] on a wall,
Humpti Dumpti [sic] had a great fall;
Threescore men and threescore more,
Cannot place Humpty dumpty as he was before

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humpty_dumpty


The alternative (=original) version has an different answer to the riddle.

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