People are shocked to discover Humpty Dumpty isn't an egg

You are surely familiar with the children's nursery rhyme 'Humpty Dumpty', it's the sort of song pretty much everyone hears when they're a kid.

Just to remind you how it goes: "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."

Yep, that one, and you're probably picturing a giant egg-man creature falling off the wall and cracking, because obviously humpty dumpty is an egg, right? Nope.

Richard Weber / Alamy Stock Photo

There's never any mention in the nursery rhyme of Humpty Dumpty being an egg, but we can explain where that image originally comes from.

People were pretty shocked to discover the nursery rhyme isn't about an egg at all.

Someone said finding out Humpty Dumpty wasn't an egg 'f**ked me up' and another said it had 'blown my MIND'.

Others pointed out the inherent ridiculousness of horses being tasked with helping put Humpty back together again, as they are notoriously quite bad at providing medical treatment or building things.

There are a few theories as to who or what Humpty Dumpty was supposed to be, since the nursery rhyme never actually provides any clues beyond him being something that fell off a wall.

But why an egg?

Neil Cameron / Alamy Stock Photo

Well, that came about because an illustrator for Lewis Carroll's book Through The Looking Glass decided to draw Humpty Dumpty as an egg and the depiction stuck.

Rather than traumatising kids with a depiction of someone or something horribly mangled by a nasty fall it's much better to imagine Humpty Dumpty as a kind of anthropomorphised egg creature, kids are used to eggs being cracked.

Some reckon the original Humpty Dumpty was King Richard III, with the last of the Plantagenet rulers of England apparently having a horse named 'Wall', which is a bit of a silly name for a horse.

Anyway, Richard III was hacked to death during the Battle of Bosworth Field and might have fallen off his horse in the fighting, and as if his day wasn't going badly enough he was buried beneath a car park in Leicester.

That's one possible explanation, that he had a great fall from 'Wall' the horse and was so thoroughly mangled to death that all his horses and men couldn't put him back together again.

Another suggestion is that Humpty Dumpty was a cannon used by the Cavaliers in the English Civil War which sat on the walls of the city of Colchester.

With the Roundheads blasting the walls to pieces the cannon fell and was so badly damaged that it became useless as a weapon.

So there you have it, Humpty Dumpty is either a cannon or a King but we do know he's definitely not an egg.