Put humpty dumpty back together again
Putting Humpty Back Together-Buffalo Bill Center of the West
by Stephanie Cashman
We all know the old nursery rhyme.
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.
And just like Humpty Dumpty, one simple tap from the duster and she was, shattered and strewn upon the floor. It seemed as if she would suffer the same fate as Humpty Dumpty and could not be put back together again. Unlike this childhood fable, the Lone Star Earth Mother by Rose Pecos-Sun Rhodes of Jemez could indeed be put back together again, for she was made of stronger stuff than Humpty Dumpty: stoneware.
Today, the breaking of an object such as with the
Lone Star Earth Mother does not signal the end of its life. There are trained individuals, called art conservators, who specialize in repairing, stabilizing, and cleaning art as well as historical objects. Here at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, there is a phenomenal art conservation internship program that allows for those perusing a career in art conservation to learn the valuable skills required in this field. I was lucky enough to be one such intern this summer, and as such I was able to perform a conservation treatment on the Lone Star Earth Mother.
Before any treatment can begin, you must first determine what you are working with. To do this a condition report is created. This provides dimensions and physical descriptions, and catalogs any damages to the object as well as the type of treatment that will be performed. Then, images must be taken before the treatment is carried out. This ensures that later conservators will be able to visually determine what was done as well as show the exact state that the object was in before treatment. The images are then added to the report, which is then sent to the owner for approval. Once you have said approval, the real fun can begin.
In the case of the Lone Star Earth Mother, the first thing was to clean all of the fragments. You want to make sure that there is no dirt or grime on the exposed edges of the fragment. If dirt or grime is present, the fragments will not fit together as they should. Once clean, the fragments are then placed together. However, at this point no adhesive is used. This exercise is to determine the best way in which to put the Earth Mother back together. If I simply started adhering fragments together willy nilly, I could end up with one piece that would not fit in, and then I would have to remove the adhesive and start all over again.
Lone Star Earth Mother During TreatmentDuring this process I discovered that the statue is comprised of two pieces, one with the neck and head of the Earth Mother and the other the clothes. I would have to repair the interior structure of the head and neck first; otherwise, it would never have fit into the cloth-like elements. There was a large crack on the base of the neck.
This was most likely formed during the bisque process. In order to provide additional support, a patch was applied on the interior. Once the patch was secured, the head and neck pieces were adhered together and placed in the cloth-like exterior. Then, all the other fragments were reattached in the order that had been determined earlier.
One would think that at this point the treatment was complete. For all intents and purposes the sculpture is back together. This however, was not the end of the Lone Star Earth Mother’s stay in the conservation lab. Not all of her fragments had been recovered, and as such there were losses or holes. There were also losses along the fragment joints, therefore I filled losses and then painted over them to match the existing surface. This visually integrates the losses and the sculpture no longer appears damaged. All of the materials used are easily reversible so that if someone does not like what was done, or the repairs ever fail, they could be removed without damaging the object.
Once the treatment is completed more photographs are taken to show what was done to the object. Sometimes, the transformation from start to finish is truly astonishing. The conservator compiles a treatment report that includes the before and after photographs, a description of exactly what was done, and notes on the materials used. That report then accompanies the object for the remainder of its life so that future conservators will know exactly what was done.
Lone Star Earth Mother After Treatment, FrontLone Star Earth Mother After Treatment, BackSpecial thanks to J. Schaefer for allowing me to work on and write about the Lone Star Earth Mother.
Filed Under: Conservation, Staff Tagged With: conservation, conservation internship, Lone Star Earth Mother, Rose Pecos- Sun Rhodes, stoneware
About Stephanie Cashman
Stephanie Cashman is a recent graduate of the University of Denver with a bachelors of fine arts. She is currently working towards applying to graduate school in art conservation.
Putting It Together Again – Now I Know
If you grew up in the United States or likely anywhere else in the English-speaking world, you’ve heard the tale of Humpty Dumpty, the egg-man pictured above from a 1904 illustration. If you haven’t, for some reason or another, here’s a common version of the nursery rhyme:
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.
It’s a short, simple, AABB rhyme. Easy to remember, too, so it’s no mystery as to why it’s well-known. But there is a mystery buried within those twenty-six words, or, more accurately, omitted from them. Everyone agrees that Humpty Dumpty is an egg. But the rhyme doesn’t actually tell us that.
Where does that come from?
On its face, there’s no reason for the rhyme to be about an egg or egg-man. If any one of us had a great fall off a wall at the time of king’s men riding on horseback, there’s good reason to think that we’d be irreparably broken.
And to the extent that the Humpty Dumpty story is a parable, “don’t sit atop walls” is a much better lesson than “try not to turn into an egg-person.” So that’s probably not what’s going on here. The origins of the rhyme date back to at least 1797, but the original words, below, similarly do not say that the wall-sitting Mr. Dumpty is an egg:
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
Four-score Men and Four-score more,
Could not make Humpty Dumpty where he was before.
But by 1871, Humpty Dumpty’s oval-shaped status appears well entrenched. That year, Lewis Carroll published “Through the Looking Glass,” the sequel to “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and a classic in its own right. At one point, Alice sees an egg-like thing in the distance, and walks toward it:
HOWEVER, the egg only got larger and larger, and more and more human: when she had come within a few yards of it, she saw that it had eyes and a nose and mouth; and, when she had come close to it, she saw clearly that it was HUMPTY DUMPTY himself.
‘It can’t be anybody else!’ she said to herself. ‘I’m as certain of it, as if his name were written all over his face!’
Because really, even in Wonderland or in that world beyond the other side of the mirror, there aren’t a lot of egg-men.
The likely explanation, per the trivia-mavens at the Straight Dope, is that the rhyme was never intended to be a parable. Rather, they find, it was a riddle — “riddling rhymes were a popular source of entertainment for many centuries.” Going to the rhyme itself, the earliest known version references “four-score Men and Four-score more” — that’s 160 total — is the rhymes way of saying that despite dramatic amounts of available resources, the problem surprisingly couldn’t be solved. The way it makes sense is if you “solve” the puzzle, concluding that Humpty Dumpty wasn’t any regular man, but one with the cranial fortitude of an egg. (In fact, in “Through the Looking Glass,” Humpty Dumpty himself finds it ridiculous that anything could happen to him, because if he fell, the king would surely take steps necessary to repair him.
) Makes sense, kind of.
And while there’s some evidence that may not be the case — here’s a picture from an 1877 children’s book showing Humpty as a young, non-egg boy — the image above buttresses the claim set forth by the Straight Dope. The image, from a 1902 Mother Goose book, clearly identifies Humpty Dumpty as an egg and does so in a way to suggest that the rhyme is a riddle. It’s just one you already knew the answer to — but, probably not why.
Bonus fact: Mother Goose never existed — she’s a fictional poet (perhaps named as such due to the popularity of Old Mother Hubbard) who acts as a stand-in for the nanny-ish, motherly figure. References to “Mother Goose” (in various languages, most often French) date back to the early-1600s, but don’t tell that to tour guides in Boston. Many highlight the gravestone of a “Mary Goose,” who died in 1690 in her forties (see the gravestone here), as being the final resting place of the Mother Goose, but that’s not rooted in anything close to verifiable history.
From the Archives: And The Oscar Doesn’t Go To: When a movie’s director wanted to be credited as “Humpty Dumpty.”
Related: A collection of Mother Goose nursery rhymes. 4.8 stars on 85 reviews.
Dictionary of Humpty Dumpty - Humpty Dumpty
Hello again!
This is Alya Vereshchetina, editor-in-chief of the children's literary and art magazine for bilingual children aged 2-6 (and their parents) "Humpty Dumpty".
Today I really want to tell you about our Glossary column.
This rubric was one of the first ones that was invented when creating the concept of our magazine. And for the third year now, faithfully, he has been serving on the pages of Humpty Dumpty. However, during its existence, it was she who underwent the most obvious changes.
So, a dictionary! Agree, this is the most logical heading for a magazine addressed to bilingual children. Already someone, and they from the very first babble became adept at translating words from the coordinate system of one language into another.
Initially, when we came up with our dictionary, we wanted to make it a platform for children's self-expression: according to our audacious plan, it was supposed to be a Baby-Russian dictionary, in which children from all over the world were invited to take part.
Probably, only the lazy did not quote Korney Chukovsky: "A brilliant linguist lives in every child." So, 2 brilliant linguists (or more) live in a bilingual - a brilliant linguist for each language. Feeling, living and seeing the system of not one, but several languages at once, our beloved bilinguals, with an even greater scope than other children, approach the process of word creation. This is not about mixing words from different languages in one sentence, we are more interested in borrowing the rules of word formation from one language to “improve” the words of another. Every mother in the "piggy bank" will find children's pearls - mutant words that have taken the best from several languages in order to more accurately and vividly reflect the meaning of the word.
Then these words for a long time (if not forever) remain in use in the family circle, surprising casual and uninitiated in the secret of its creation, a casual listener.
Therefore, in the first season of our magazine - in 2019 - we invited our readers to send such interesting words to the editors of Shaltai Dumpty in order to publish them on the pages of the magazine in the Glossary section. Stock up on patience and ... failed. By the time our readers were swinging, the year had almost flown by, and the rubric was being replenished very sparingly.
It's good that our idea was by no means new (we didn't pretend to). In the wake of working on this column, we met a wonderful children's author Tamara Gilfanova, who a few years earlier had the idea to collect interesting children's words and their meanings and create a Malyshkovo-Russian dictionary (so far everything sounds very similar, right?), but not in prose, but in verse. And it turned out such mischievous and catchy poems that we simply could not help but invite them to our rubric.
And so the poems and rare guests, children's words, sent by our first readers, were printed on one page. At some point, the main “dictionary work” moved to our instagram @shaltay_boltay_uk, where we received very interesting comments with new words, so interesting that Tamara could not resist and created as many as 2 new poems for the words that she liked the most - Ulyoga (Snail) from 2-year-old Sasha and Netudam (Suitcase) from 2-year-old Alice. Both winners became not just muses-inspirers for new poems, but also received a book by Tamara Gilfanova "Malyshkovo-Russian dictionary in verse" as a gift.
Although our expectations were not met, we were nevertheless satisfied with the result. The rubric was not abandoned, but in the next season - 2020 - it was modified. Now, in the Glossary section, we gave definitions to allegorical words and expressions, talked about the history of their origin - with an obligatory illustration in verse (we really liked this format, which spontaneously arose in 2019).
Now the heading began to include a cognitive and educational element. Together with Humpty Dumpty, the children not only learned where the crayfish hibernate, where the washing machine flew, or why the trace caught a cold, but also got the opportunity to put their knowledge into practice: here, on the spread, we offered options for using these words in an independent neighboring rubric or asked tricky questions for their understanding. But understanding and competent use of phraseological units not only decorates speech, but raises knowledge of the language to a higher level.
And here is the third season of our magazine - the year 2021. This year, despite all the pandemics, closed borders and quarantines, we at Shaltai-Boltai declared the year of travel. Each issue is dedicated to some geographical region in which our readers live. Through poems and fairy tales, as well as informative articles and stories, we introduce children to the basics of geography, as well as highlight the traditions and culture of the “host country”.
And such an immersion would be incomplete without getting to know the language. Therefore, our vocabulary has changed again and this time it has appeared as a phrase book. We decided to give it the simplest words that may come in handy on a trip to a particular country. But they couldn’t just give up old habits either - we’ll present this phrasebook in verse, then we’ll add a note according to some interesting expression. In general, do not switch)
It turns out that our Dictionary, like the language itself, is dynamic and changeable. What awaits us next year? We don’t know yet, but we will listen with pleasure to the opinion of our readers, which format they liked the most. By the way, we have not abandoned our ambitious plan to collect the “Malyshkovo-Russian Dictionary of Humpty Dumpty” at all. Interesting words can still be sent to our editorial office at [email protected]. The most unusual words will be published in our special issue "Humpty Dumpty: Children" (I will definitely tell you about this project too!).
Read our magazine, watch the video attachment to it on our YouTube channel shaltay-boltay.com/YouTube, follow us on Instagram @shaltay_boltay_uk and on Facebook @ShaltayBoltayChildrenMagazine. On the site shaltay-boltay.com you can download absolutely free of charge the electronic issue of the magazine "Adventures in the Animal World". It so happened that this number without a dictionary. But here is our dictionary in all three formats from other issues:
- Dictionary-Winter-fun
- Dictionary-New Year's Carnival
- Vocabulary-Fabulous-Britain
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