But as i've recently clocked while in the Shire, humpty is also winking at us in Gollum's cave, and maybe throughout The Hobbit. And I will confess that prior to posting my humpty riddle i had not fully fathomed how this was so.For my present purpose I require a word which shall embrace both the Sub-creative Art in itself and a quality of strangeness and wonder in the Expression, derived from the Image: a quality essential to fairy-story. I propose, therefore, to arrogate to myself the powers of Humpty-Dumpty, and to use Fantasy for this purpose...
So the first thing i want to suggest is that it seems to me, peering at this, that it is thanks to Lewis Carroll that we see so clearly that humpty dumpty = an egg. Looking up Humpty on Wiki you find a general sense that the nursery rhyme is a riddle for an egg, but nobody is quite sure and lots of other explanations of the rhyme are proposed. But when we follow Alice we discover Carroll's ruminations on the riddle. Let's start with @Drifa's helpful definition:
So a box without hinges, key or lid with golden treasure inside hid = the enigma type. And the nursery rhyme = another engima with the same solution. Tolkien frames the egg in its simplest, purest form. Carroll's play on the egg begins:A riddle is a statement, question or phrase having a double or veiled meaning, put forth as a puzzle to be solved. Riddles are of two types: enigmas, which are problems generally expressed in metaphorical or allegorical language that requires ingenuity and careful thinking for their solution, and conundra, which are questions relying on their effects on punning in either the question or the answer.
So, that very first bit - the egg gets larger and larger as Alice sees what/who it is. This is a picture of 'getting' a riddle, no? Only, as we are 'through the looking glass' Alice gets it backwards - she starts with the egg and arrives at the nursery rhyme! And then we get a key indication of the relationship between the answer and a real egg - 'like' and 'looked like', as if a name was written on a face. I think something here is vital for the way the minds of both Oxford scholars worked - this use of 'seeing' for something queer happening with words. With both riddles - the nursery rhyme and the hingeless box - one 'gets' the riddle when one 'sees' that the words enigmatically describe an egg; but on the other hand, appearances are recognized as deceptive, it is all about looking, appearing, seeming like...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!'
It might have been written a hundred times, easily, on that enormous face. Humpty Dumpty was sitting, with his legs crossed like a Turk, on the top of a high wall — such a narrow one that Alice quite wondered how he could keep his balance — and, as his eyes were steadily fixed in the opposite direction, and he didn't take the least notice of her, she thought he must be a stuffed figure, after all.
'And how exactly like an egg he is!' she said aloud, standing with her hands ready to catch him, for she was every moment expecting him to fall.
'It's very provoking,' Humpty Dumpty said after a long silence, looking away from Alice as he spoke, 'to be called an egg — very!'
'I said you looked like an egg, Sir,' Alice gently explained.
And a second thing. On my thread on Proper Names for @Romeran, i discuss the logicians John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell. I do believe that Mill gives us the royal road to The Hobbit. But obviously, to the extent that J.R.R. Tolkien was engaging with a logician it was Charles Dodgson aka Lewis Carroll (incidentally, Carroll's The Game of Logic was by far and away the best pandemic home education book i set my kids). We can indeed frame the question of proper names in the dry terms of debate between Mill and Russell - 'Does a proper name have meaning?' - but to seek the tradition in which Tolkien's imagination worked we would do much better dwelling on this chapter.
And there is so much more... :) But you gotta read the Humpty Dumpty for yourselves before we can make an omelet. I'll leave you with some more...'My name is Alice, but —'
'It's a stupid name enough!' Humpty Dumpty interrupted impatiently. 'What does it mean?'
'Must a name mean something?' Alice asked doubtfully.
'Of course it must,' Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh: 'my name means the shape I am — and a good handsome shape it is, too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost.'
'Why do you sit out here all alone?' said Alice, not wishing to begin an argument.
'Why, because there's nobody with me!' cried Humpty Dumpty. 'Did you think I didn't know the answer to that? Ask another.'
'Don't you think you'd be safer down on the ground?' Alice went on, not with any idea of making another riddle, but simply in her good-natured anxiety for the queer creature. 'That wall is so very narrow!'
'What tremendously easy riddles you ask!' Humpty Dumpty growled out. 'Of course I don't think so! Why, if ever I did fall off — which there's no chance of — but if I did —' Here he pursed up his lips, and looked so solemn and grand that Alice could hardly help laughing. 'If I did fall,' he went on, 'the King has promised me — ah, you may turn pale, if you like! You didn't think I was going to say that, did you? The King has promised me — with his very own mouth — to — to —'
Sending good vibes your way..
It is all way above my head, and I have never read Through The Looking Glass, so I was unaware that Humpty Dumpty was even a character in Alice and Wonderland. 
moment when i read 
