HUMPTY DUMPTY IS AN EGG

A number of queries have appeared recently along the lines of Why is Humpty Dumpty depicted  as an egg?  The word egg doesn't occur in the rhyme.  Did the egg image come from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass?  

The answer is the rhyme was intended to be a riddle.  That is the reason the word egg is never mentioned.  The intelligent reader is supposed to deduce from the rhyme that Humpty is an egg.  When he falls off the wall, he certainly suffered from shell shock.   [Source: Iona and Peter Opie]

However, Humpty's actual name may have been derived from that of a cannon.