[1156] in Humor
HUMOR: Humpt Dumpty
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Andrew A. Bennett)
Wed Oct 25 11:20:45 1995
To: humor@MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 25 Oct 1995 11:16:48 EDT
From: "Andrew A. Bennett" <abennett@MIT.EDU>
Date: Wed, 25 Oct 1995 15:09:32 +0000 (GMT)
From: Espacionaute Spiff domine! <MATOSSIAN@aries.colorado.edu>
From: bostic@bsdi.com (Keith Bostic)
Forwarded-by: cate3@netcom.com
From: Robert Jones <jones@Think.COM>
Humpty Dumpty is an egg ... right? Not so ...
In the Manchester Guardian Weekly there is a weekly column extracted from
the daily UK guardian called "Notes and Queries" in which readers ask
questions and other readers send in answers. One reader raised the issue
that s/he always thought of Humpty Dumpty as an egg but nowhere in the
nursery rhyme is he so identified ... he was certainly illustrated as such
by Tenniel etc but what is the real story ...
It turns out that Humpty Dumpty was one of a pair of siege towers built
over 300 years ago. Siege towers were wheeled up to whatever castle or
religious cult you happened to be besieging at the time and your soldiers
would then jump over the walls etc. It was probably as tall as a house,
made of wood, had wheels and was probably covered in hides.
The tricky thing with siege towers was getting them in place -- being
heavy, loaded with troops and inevitably involved going over rough ground.
Humpty Dumpty was built during the English Civil War by the Royalists
... "all the King's horses and all the King's men" ... and it had a
little operational difficulty ... falling and being damaged beyond repair.
