From an early period the sun was supposed to be conveyed in a boat, and boats were associated with divinities half the world over. Tacitus was acquainted with the boat of the goddess Isis that was conveyed about in Alexandria, and he described the boat that was taken about in procession by the heathen Germans in their cult of Hertha, as the boat of Isis (Gr., p. 214). The sun-boat of Ra in Egypt conveyed the dead to heaven. So did the golden ship of Odin in Scandinavia, which conveyed the bodies of the fallen warriors to Valhalla. The remembrance of this sun-boat probably gave rise to the story how Ikaros invented sails. It may linger still in the "beeship" of our rhymes, and in the "Kähnchen" of the corresponding German ladybird rhyme.
CHAPTER X
RIDDLE-RHYMES
AMONG other rhymes which date some way back in history are those which may fitly be called riddle-rhymes. Some of these have close parallels in the nursery lore of other countries. The most interesting example of this class is the rhyme on Humpty-Dumpty which deals with the egg. The egg from the earliest times formed an enigma in itself, and was looked upon as representing the origin of life. Aristophanes knew of the great bird that laid the world-egg. According to Kalevala, the Finnish epic, the world-egg fell and broke. Its upper part became the vault of heaven, its lower part the earth. The yolk formed the sun, the white the moon, and the fragments of the shell became the stars in heaven. Reminiscences of this idea of a world-egg linger in the Senchus Mor of Ireland and in the Volospa of Norse saga. In Tibet the holy Budh is represented holding in his hand a broken egg-shell, on the edge of which a diminutive human being is sometimes represented sitting. These world-wide conceptions account for the existence of numerous riddles that are current about the egg.
The rhyme on Humpty-Dumpty among us is current in three variations:—
Humpty-Dumpty sate on a wall,
Humpty-Dumpty had a great fall;
Threescore men and threescore more
Cannot place Humpty-Dumpty as he was before.
(1810, p. 36.)
Humpty-Dumpty sate on a wall,
Humpty-Dumpty had a great fall;
All the king's soldiers and all the king's men
Cannot set Humpty-Dumpty up again.
(1842, p. 113.)
Humpty-Dumpty lay in a beck
With all his sinews around his neck;
Forty doctors and forty wights
Couldn't put Humpty-Dumpty to rights.
(1846, p. 209.)