The answer is "A well." Possibly the "king" of these rhymes stands for the sun as the representative of power, whose horses and men are alike powerless.
The egg, which in these rhymes is designated by fanciful names, in other riddle-rhymes current abroad is described as a cask containing two kinds of beer. A riddle was put by the god Wodan in the character of a wayfarer to King Heidrek, and stood as follows:—
"Blond—haired brides, bondswomen both, carried ale to the barn; the casks were not turned with hands nor forged by hammers; she that made it strutted about outside the isle." The answer is "Eider-ducks' eggs" (C. P., I, 89).
The egg is also likened to a cask containing beer in a short riddle-rhyme which is current from Lapland to Hungary. In the Faroe Islands it takes this form: "Bolli fell from the ledge, all its hoops fell off. There is no man in the East, there is no man in the West, who can restore it" (M., p. 417). In Prussia they say:—
Kommt ein Tonn aus Engelland,
Ohne Boden, ohne Band;
Ist zweierleai Bier drin.
(Sim., p. 287.)
"A cask comes from Engelland, without bottom, without band; it contains two kinds of beer."
Among ourselves there is no riddle-rhyme, as far as I know, which describes the egg as a cask containing beer. But in the seventeenth century the word Humpty-Dumpty was used to designate a drink which consisted of ale boiled in brandy,[48] and this conception obviously hangs together with the two kinds of beer of the foreign riddle-rhymes on the egg.
Other riddle-rhymes current among ourselves or abroad describe the egg as a house or a castle. The following one describes it as an enigma in itself:—
As I was going o'er London Bridge
I saw something under a hedge;
'Twas neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor bone,
And yet in three weeks it runned alone.
(1846, p. 213.)
Girls in America play a game called Humpty-Dumpty. They sit on the ground with their skirts tightly gathered around them so as to enclose the feet. The leader begins some rhyme, all join in, and at a certain word previously agreed upon, all throw themselves backwards, keeping their skirts tightly grasped. The object is to recover the former position without letting go the skirt (N., p. 132).