Jabberwocky

• 1. Introduction

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  "Jabberwocky" begins with four words that should be meaningless: "'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves." Lewis Carroll, an English author and mathematician, wrote those words not for a novel but for a handmade family periodical called Mischmasch, where they appeared in 1855 under the title "Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry". He was staying in Croft-on-Tees at the time, at his parents' home, nearly a decade before Alice's Adventures in Wonderland would make him famous. That single stanza would eventually grow into a complete poem about the killing of a creature named the Jabberwock, published inside Through the Looking-Glass in 1871. The poem is now considered one of the greatest nonsense poems written in English. But what exactly makes it nonsense? Why has it been translated into 65 languages? And how did a poem designed to show how not to write verse become the subject of serious literary analysis and classroom study?

• 2. A World Turned Inside Out

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  Alice first encounters the poem in an early scene of Through the Looking-Glass, where she finds a book written in a language she cannot read. The world she has entered is inverted, running back-to-front, and she realises the text is mirror writing. She holds a mirror to the page, and "Jabberwocky" comes into view. She finds it just as puzzling as the dreamscape she has wandered into, noting that somebody killed something, but little else is clear. Carroll wrote the remaining stanzas of the poem during a later stay with relatives at Whitburn, near Sunderland. The story of the Jabberwock may have been partly inspired by regional legends Carroll encountered there, including the tale of the Lambton Worm and the Sockburn Worm, both creatures from the Sunderland area. The original 1855 stanza was printed in faux-mediaeval lettering as a "relic of ancient Poetry", playing on the form before the content had fully arrived. John Tenniel agreed, albeit reluctantly, to illustrate the book in 1871, and his depiction of the Jabberwock has never been displaced as the defining image of the creature. Stephen Prickett notes that Tenniel gave it the leathery wings of a pterodactyl and the long scaly neck and tail of a sauropod, drawing on the contemporary Victorian fascination with palaeontology and geology, energised by vast exhibitions of dinosaurs at the Crystal Palace from 1854.

• 3. A Lexicon of Invented Words

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  Humpty Dumpty is the poem's reluctant dictionary. In Through the Looking-Glass, he explains to Alice the meaning of the words in the first stanza, offering that "brillig" means four o'clock in the afternoon, "the time when you begin broiling things for dinner", and that a "rath" is "a sort of green pig". Carroll's own notes in Mischmasch tell a different story: a rath is "a species of Badger" that "lived chiefly on cheese" and had smooth white hair, long hind legs, and short horns like a stag. The appendices of some Looking-Glass editions describe it as "a species of land turtle" that lived on swallows and oysters. Carroll himself acknowledged that he did not know the specific meanings or sources of some of the words, suggesting the ambiguity was largely the point. In a letter from December 1877, he noted that "burble" could be a blend of "bleat", "murmur", and "warble", though he did not remember inventing it. For "frumious", he explained in the Preface to The Hunting of the Snark that if a speaker tries to say "fuming" and "furious" at once without deciding which comes first, the result is "frumious". Some of these inventions have since escaped the poem entirely. "Chortle", defined by Carroll as a combination of "chuckle" and "snort", and "galumphing", possibly blending "gallop" and "triumphant", are both listed in the Oxford English Dictionary. When Carroll was asked by a class in the Girls' Latin School in Boston whether they could name their school magazine The Jabberwock, he traced the word to the Anglo-Saxon "wocer" or "wocor", meaning "offspring" or "fruit", combined with "jabber" in its sense of "excited and voluble discussion".

• 4. Satire That Outgrew Itself

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  According to G. K. Chesterton and biographer Roger Lancelyn Green, the original purpose of "Jabberwocky" was to satirise pretentious verse and ignorant literary critics. It was constructed as a demonstration of how not to write poetry. The poem has also been read as a parody of Oxford scholarship, and specifically of the story of Benjamin Jowett, the notoriously agnostic Professor of Greek at Oxford and Master of Balliol, who signed the Thirty-Nine Articles as an Anglican statement of faith in order to keep his position. Carroll's cousin Menella Bute Smedley had translated a German ballad called "The Shepherd of the Giant Mountains" into English in 1846, and Green suggested "Jabberwocky" may have been a parody of that text. Historian Sean B. Palmer has further proposed that Carroll was shaped by lines in Shakespeare's Hamlet, specifically the image from Act I, Scene i of the sheeted dead who "did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets". Chesterton predicted in 1932 the exact fate that awaited the poem: "Poor, poor, little Alice! She has not only been caught and made to do lessons; she has been forced to inflict lessons on others." Carroll himself noted, in his author's note to the Christmas 1896 edition of Through the Looking-Glass, that the invented words had prompted so many pronunciation disputes that he published explicit guidance, specifying that "slithy" should be said as "sly, thee" and that "rath" should rhyme with "bath".

• 5. The Challenge of Translation

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  Translators who take on "Jabberwocky" face a double problem: the poem's nonsense words are woven into English grammar, and many of them carry phonetic texture that resists direct transfer. The poem has crossed into 65 languages, with translators generally solving the problem by inventing parallel nonsense words that echo Carroll's sounds while respecting the morphology of the target language. In Frank L. Warrin's French version, the opening "'Twas brillig" becomes "Il brilgue". Douglas Hofstadter, in his essay "Translations of Jabberwocky", examined how a word like "slithy" draws on "slimy", "slither", "slippery", "lithe", and "sly" in English, and asked whether the French "lubricilleux" captures an equivalent range of connotations or whether a simpler coinage like "huilasse" might do a better job. In 1967, D. G. Orlovskaya wrote a popular Russian translation entitled "Barmaglot", rendering "Jabberwock" as "Barmaglot" and "Bandersnatch" as "Brandashmyg". Satyajit Ray, the film-maker, translated the poem into Bengali. Chinese linguist Chao Yuen Ren solved the invented-word problem in Chinese by creating new characters to approximate the feel of Carroll's language. M. L. West, writing in a 1964 article, produced two versions in Ancient Greek, each modelled on a different epic poet, Homer and Nonnus. Hofstadter observed that even in this exceptionally difficult case, translation can achieve a rough equivalence across readers, what he called "a kind of rough isomorphism, partly global, partly local, between the brains of all the readers".

• 6. Poetry, Parody, and Influence

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  Linguist Peter Lucas has argued that the label "nonsense" misrepresents the poem, which relies on a distortion of sense rather than an absence of it, allowing readers to follow a narrative even without knowing what the words mean. Scholar Marnie Parsons called it a "semiotic catastrophe", meaning that the poem creates a discernible story while the words' symbolism remains open. She connected this to the poem's prosody: a tension between the tetrameter of each stanza's first three lines and the shorter trimeter of the fourth leaves readers perpetually off balance, like the hero in the poem. Carroll's broader habit of parody, seen in poems such as "You Are Old, Father William" and "How Doth the Little Crocodile?", placed him in a tradition, but "Jabberwocky" has outlasted the works it may have mocked. His contemporaries Edward Lear and Gerard Manley Hopkins have both been cited as analogues, the first for playful gravity, the second for the shared use of soundplay, alliteration, and portmanteau. In American Sign Language, Eric Malzkuhn invented the sign for "chortled" in 1939 while developing a 1994 ASL performance of the poem; the sign unintentionally caught on and became part of ASL's permanent lexicon. Douglas Adams, in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy published in 1979, wove numerous homages to Carroll into the text, including the poem "Oh Freddled Gruntbuggly", recited in the novel by Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz. In 1981, the Jabberwock was formalised as a creature in Dungeons and Dragons, appearing in the magazine Dragon, and the Vorpal Sword, named after Carroll's invented word, was described as a weapon capable of decapitating a creature in a single blow.