Humpty Dumpty

1904 book Humpty Dumpty by William Wallace Denslow

Humpty Dumpty ( English ; literal translation into German: "humpbacked Plumpsiger") is a character from a British nursery rhyme . It is a human-like egg, which is not explicitly mentioned in the text of the quatrain. In the English-speaking world, this nursery rhyme has been popular for centuries and is something of a staple in the collection of nursery rhymes in Mother Goose . Outside the English-speaking world, Humpty Dumpty became known primarily because Lewis Carroll had him appear in Alice Behind the Mirrors (1871) (in the German translation Humpty Dumpty means Gogglemoggel ). There he discusses semantics with Alice and explains, among other things, Jabberwocky's word creations . English speakers also like to refer to a small and plump person as "Humpty Dumpty" . Occasionally, however, it is synonymous with something fragile that cannot be repaired at all or is difficult to repair.

Text and transmissions

Alice and Humpty Dumpty, illustration to Alice Behind the Looking Glass by John Tenniel , 1871

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.

There are several German translations of the poem “Humpty Dumpty”, originally intended as a riddle. They all testify to the attempt to preserve the sound and rhythm of the original in the translation, or at least to produce translated texts that are rhymed and metrically bound like the original. The content of the text and the linguistic images are sometimes neglected and translators often try to fill in the gaps in the original text according to their understanding.

A free German translation reads:

"Humpty Dumpty was way too lively, Humpty Dumpty fell down from the wall,

not ten horses, not a hundred men, could get the poor back together. "

Another:

“Humpty Dumpty sat on the corner, Humpty Dumpty fell in the dirt

and also the king with his army, no longer saved Humpty Dumpty. "

Another:

“Humpty Dumpty fell from the stone, Humpty Dumpty broke his leg

and also the king with his army, no longer saved Humpty Dumpty. "

Another:

“Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall, Humpty Dumpty fell deeply

even the king with all his men could no longer bring Humpty together. "

Another:

“Hampti Dampti, a snow-white egg, fell from the wall and broke in two.

The king sends knights with horses and Lanz, but who of the gentlemen can make an egg whole again? "

Another:

“Eilein, Weilein sat on the wall, Eilein, Weilein fell into the sand.

And the king with his army also saves Eilein, Weilein no longer. "

Another:

“Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall and fell down, ouch!

All of the king's horses and all of his men did not bring Humpty Dumpty back together. "

Another:

“Humpty Dumpty sat in wait. Humpty Dumpty fell from the wall.

The king's knights and their servants couldn't fix Humpty again. "

melody

The melody commonly associated with rhyme was first recorded by nursery rhyme composer and collector James William Elliott (in National Nursery Rhymes and Nursery Songs (London, 1870)), and is as follows:

Original hypotheses

• According to the East Anglia Tourism Authority , Humpty Dumpty was a cannon that was erected on the tower of St Mary's at the Wall during the siege of the royal troops-held city of Colchester in the English Civil War in 1648, which was brought down by a gun hit by the Republican besiegers has been. Neither the royal cavalry nor the infantry (= "All the King's horses and all the King's men ...") could do anything against it.
• According to another hypothesis, Humpty Dumpty was a nickname for the English king Richard III. who, according to contemporary reports, had a hunched back. At the Battle of Bosworth Field , he was knocked from his horse, fatally wounded in the head with a sword or halberd, and then violated. His body was buried in a monastery and rediscovered in 2012.
• Martin Gardner assumed that Humpty Dumpty is an old slang word for " clumsy ".

philosophy

"[...] There you have fame!"

"I don't know what you mean by 'fame'," said Alice.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course not - until I tell you. I said: You have a nice compelling argument! "

"But 'fame' doesn't mean 'nice compelling argument'," said Alice.

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty replied rather disparagingly, "it means exactly what I make it mean and nothing else."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can just give the words so many different meanings".

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “who's in power - and that's all. [...] "

Following this passage from Lewis Carroll's Alice Behind the Looking Glass , the name Humpty Dumpty is used frequently and mostly in a polemical sense in philosophy:

Humpty-Dumpty arguments are claims (1.) which are presented as valid in a discussion without any other reason being given than the appeal to factual power which allows one to dispense with real arguments, or (2.) in which words are used with a meaning that deviates from the generally accepted meaning in a blatant way (cf. idiosyncrasy ).

Humpty-Dumpty semantics is an intentionalist conception of language that assumes that words do not have their meaning through use, but that they are constituted by meaning -conferring acts of the subject . In this sense, the expression is mainly used in the context of the language- analytical critique of the philosophy of consciousness - such as the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl .

music

• In the music scene you can find several quotes from the nursery rhyme, for example in Travis ' The Humpty Dumpty Love Song, the last song on her album The Invisible Band (2001). In the first lines Fran Healy uses the four-line wording: "All of the king's horses / And all of the king's men / Couldn't pull my heart back together again. // All of the physicians / And mathematicians too / Failed to stop my heart from breaking in two. ”In the course of the text it becomes clear that only the sung-about person is able to put the narrator's heart back together, which is presented as impossible in the actual nursery rhyme. Hence the conclusion: "Yeah you got the glue / So I'm gonna give my heart to you."
• The well-known nursery rhyme is also romanticized in Aimee Mann's Humpty Dumpty, the theme song of her album Lost In Space (2002). The song begins with the verse "Say you were split, you were split in fragments / and none of the pieces would talk to you", a first allusion to the poem. In the middle part of the song, the original version is modernized a bit: horses and soldiers become “perfect drugs and superheroes” and instead of a broken egg being with Aimee Mann it is the future of two people that cannot be put back together again. Finally, she ends the text with the words "All the King's horses and all the King's men / Couldn't put baby together again" so that the song is practically framed by the picture of the nursery rhyme.
• Similarly, the chorus to Billy Joel's song The Great Wall of China reads : "All the king's men and all the king's horses / Can't put you together the way you used to be" (on the album River Of Dreams. 1993).
• Tori Amos also recorded a song Humpty Dumpty . Published on the B-side of the China single.
• The Beastie Boys have released a song called Egg Man on their album Paul's Boutique , which says: “… Humpty Dumpty was a big fat egg. He was playing the wall then he broke his leg… ".
• In The Alan Parsons Projects The Turn of a Friendly Card. The third stanza says about a gambler who has bet everything and lost everything, "And not all the king's horses and all the king's men / Have prevented the fall of the unwise".
• In the piece Mr. Beat by the band Miime, the side project of the formation Samsas Traum that sounds like the typical electro pop of the 1980s , which was released as part of an EP on the bonus CD of the album Arachnoidea (2003), the first line of the bridge reads “I was walking down the sidewalk of old Humpty-Dumpty-Street ”.
• Joss Stone also released a song on her album The Soul Sessions under the title All the kings horses . The first line refers to the Humpty Dumpty rhyme: "All the king's horses and all the king's men / They couldn't put our two hearts together again."
• Another song in which this rhyme was taken literally, is Hey Diddle Diddle on the album Almost Heaven of the Kelly Family .
• Squonk from Genesis also varies some passages of the poem. ( A trick of the tail ) "All the Kings [...] could never put a smile on that face".
• The band Primus quotes the rhyme in their song Pudding Time .
• The band blemishes in 1998 released a single called Hampty Dampty .
• The King's Singers , a six -member a cappella ensemble from Great Britain , joke in their setting of this children's poem: "All the King's Singers and all the King's men ..." (see self-referentiality ).
• Mel Brooks sings in his Hitler parody To Be or Not to Be : “Like Humpty Dumpty over that wall, / All the little countries they began to fall: / Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Poland, / The troops were rockin 'and the tanks were rollin '. "
• In the song Dancing shoes on the album Summer Holiday, Cliff Richard sings about Humpty Dumpty alongside other nursery rhyme characters: “A friend of mine had an accident / Laughed so hard off the wall he went / (A) Humpty Dumpty was his name / I guess you 've all heard the same / He was lying on the ground / (A) Bits and pieces all around / ... "
• The band Nickelback sings in their song Must Be Nice : "Jack be nimble, jack be quick, jack wound up with a broken neck / Humpty dumpty, do your thing / Daddy's gonna buy you a diamond ring."
• In the work of the American hip-hop band Digital Underground (pieces of music, costumes, graphics) the rapper Shock G appears under the pseudonym "Humpty Hump". Quote from the rap lyrics: "The humpty dance is your chance to do the hump."

physics

Anglo-Saxon physicists use the Humpty-Dumpty nursery rhyme to symbolize the second law of thermodynamics . This deals with the nature of entropy , which, in abstract terms, is a measure of disorder and which, according to the second law, can only increase, but can never decrease in total. The second law is also often explained by the fact that while it is easy to empty a cup of coffee on the floor, it is practically impossible to put the coffee back in the cup and restore it to its original state.

The nursery rhyme by Humpty Dumpty ultimately describes this fact:

1. Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall - ordered initial state, complex living system;
2. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall - change of state occurs, Humpty Dumpty dies;
3. All the King's horses and all the King's men / Couldn't put Humpty together again - even with a lot of effort, this change of state cannot be reversed.

astronomy

The main belt asteroid (17627) Humptydumpty , discovered in 1996, was named after the figure.

literature

References to this rhyme can also be found in the literature.

• In Paul Auster's novel City of Glass, Humpty-Dumpty comes across Peter Stillmans senior. with Daniel Quinn before.
• In the fantasy novel The Big over Easy by Jasper Fforde , Humpty-Dumpty's fall is dealt with in a criminalist manner.
• Canadian novel Obasan by Joy Kogawa Humpty Dumpty serves as a metaphor for irreversible brokenness (the interned family or the self-denying brother of the protagonist).
• In the novel Unwind by Neal Shusterman , a main plot is about the legend of Humphrey Dunfee, which was broken down into its body parts and distributed to various recipients. Now his father is desperately looking for the individual parts and should at least be reunited at a meeting of the donation recipients.

Movie

• In the 2011 film Puss in Boots , Humpty-Dumpty is the partner of the title character on adventures together. His reference to a nursery rhyme is also mentioned as a gag.

Web links

Commons : Humpty Dumpty  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Langenscheidt's English Euro Dictionary, revision. Langenscheidt KG, Berlin / Munich 2001, ISBN 3-468-12122-9 . P. 99, p. 147
2. ↑ Joseph Ritson: Gammer Gurton's garland: or, the nursery Parnassus; a choice collection of pretty songs and verses, for the amusement of all little good children who can neither read nor run . R. Triphook by Harding and Wright, 1810, p. 36 ( google.com ).
3. ↑ Lewis Carroll: Jabberwocky. Retrieved December 2, 2015 . 
4. ↑ Susan Kreller: On the Verses. (PDF) June 10, 2008, accessed December 2, 2015 . 
5. ↑ Mary Schachinger (Ed.): English Nursery Rhymes - Englische Kinderreime . Urfahr: Landesverlag, Linz 1946, p. 20 (English: English Nursery Rhymes . Translated by Mary Schachinger).
6. ↑ Kahlau, Heinz: The fairy tales of the mother goose . Children's book publisher, Berlin 1973, p. 27 .
7. ↑ Erika Tophoven (ed.): English Nursery Rhymes - English nursery rhymes . bilingual. dtv, Munich 1995, ISBN 978-3-423-09336-1 , p. 63 (English: English Nursery Rhymes . Translated by Erika Tophoven).
8. ↑ Humpty. mrcookie, March 5, 2013, accessed December 2, 2015 . 
9. ^ JJ Fuld, The Book of World-Famous Music: Classical, Popular, and Folk (Courier Dover Publications, 5th edn., 2000), ISBN 0-486-41475-2 , page 502.
10. ↑ us.penguingroup.com ( Memento of the original from February 27, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
11. ↑ Humpty Dumpty translation. Aimee Mann, accessed December 2, 2015 . 
12. ↑ Exemplary publication of Digital Underground: This is an EP Release . Audio CD, Tommy Boy Music 1990, Tommy Boy / Indisc TBCD 3680
13. ↑ Neal Shusterman: Unwind . Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2009, ISBN 978-1-4169-1205-7 .