Humpty Dumpty Was A Good Egg (Or Not)

 

                   Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

           Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

           All the kings’s horses and all the king’s men

           Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

All in all Humpty Dumpty seems to be a Good Egg. British people use Good Egg to signify good character in a person. In America we use the term to signify an excellent breakfast. Mother Goose, however, never stated that Humpty Dumpty was an egg. In fact, earliest versions have this last line:

           Threescore men and threescore men,

           Cannot place Humpty Dumpty as he was before.

Not only does this not rhyme, it damages the age-old idea of a talking egg dressed in early 1800’s British school clothes. Scholars of such things believe the story was borrowed from an even earlier French riddle and Humpty Dumpty was a tortoise. Another view is that this riddle/rhyme was aimed at the King of England who was a bit on the round side and who lost a strategic war. Fast forward seventy-five or so years to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Humpty Dumpty is portrayed as a contemptuous grammar-fiend who argues with Alice. He is an egg in Carroll’s story, but certainly not a good egg.

Good Eggs may be clumsy and prone to fall down, but they are never argumentative with little lost girls. Good Eggs also likely realize there’s no such thing as, as he was before. Good and Bad Eggs change each day. No one is static. We all exist in a state of flux, exacerbating our fluxness with daily decisions and actions. There’s no going back. Plus, we can’t fix ourselves. Lord knows we try to fix ourselves. The self-help publishing world is a billion-dollar business and growing. No amount of glue and precision can piece us together exactly as we were before.

Here’s the takeaway: God can make us better. If it were possible to be put together exactly as before, would that be preferable to better than before? Hardly. We tumble, we fall and we break (spiritually, emotionally and physically) but God can make us new, whole and better than ever. And that’s no nursery rhyme! 

Michael McCullar