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Jabberwocky: the story on HearLore | HearLore
Common questions
When was the poem Jabberwocky first written by Lewis Carroll?
Lewis Carroll wrote the first stanza of Jabberwocky in the year 1855 while living with his parents in Croft-on-Tees. He originally published the lines in a family magazine called Mischmasch under the title Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry.
In which novel did the poem Jabberwocky first appear to the public?
The poem Jabberwocky first appeared in the 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass. It was placed in a scene where Alice encounters the chess piece characters White King and White Queen and reads the verses in mirror writing.
Who illustrated the poem Jabberwocky and when did he agree to do so?
John Tenniel reluctantly agreed to illustrate the book in 1871 and his illustrations remain the defining images of the poem. His depiction of the Jabberwock reflects Victorian obsessions with natural history and includes features like leathery wings and a long scaly neck.
What is the meaning of the word vorpal in the poem Jabberwocky?
The word vorpal has appeared in dictionaries as meaning both deadly and extremely sharp. It refers to the magic sword used by the hero to decapitate the Jabberwock in a single blow.
How many languages has the poem Jabberwocky been translated into?
Jabberwocky has been translated into 65 languages. Translators have generally dealt with the invented words by creating equivalent words of their own that respect the morphology of the target language.
What was the original purpose of the poem Jabberwocky according to Chesterton and Green?
Jabberwocky
In the year 1855, a decade before the world would know Alice, a man named Charles Lutwidge Dodgson wrote four lines of poetry that made no sense at all. He called it the Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry and printed it in a family magazine he created called Mischmasch. The lines described a creature with a long serpentine neck, rabbit-like teeth, and spidery talons, but the words used to describe it were entirely new inventions. Dodgson, who was better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, had already begun to experiment with the idea that language could be twisted to create meaning where none existed. He wrote the first stanza while living with his parents in Croft-on-Tees, and the poem was printed in faux-mediaeval lettering to make it look like an ancient relic. The word the appeared as þe, a form of the word the, to give the piece an air of antiquity. This early draft was the seed from which the famous Jabberwocky would grow, a seed that would eventually bloom into one of the most famous poems in the English language.
The Looking-Glass World
When the poem finally appeared in the 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass, it was placed in a scene where Alice first encounters the chess piece characters White King and White Queen. She finds a book written in a seemingly unintelligible language, and realizing she is traveling through an inverted world, she recognizes that the verses on the pages are written in mirror writing. She holds a mirror to one of the poems and reads the reflected verse of Jabberwocky. The poem is considered one of the greatest nonsense poems written in English, and its playful, whimsical language has given English nonsense words and neologisms such as galumphing and chortle. The concept of nonsense verse was not original to Carroll, who would have known of chapbooks such as The World Turned Upside Down and stories such as The Grand Panjandrum. Nonsense existed in Shakespeare's work and was well-known in the Brothers Grimm's fairytales, some of which are called lying tales or lügenmärchen. Biographer Roger Lancelyn Green suggested that Jabberwocky was a parody of the German ballad The Shepherd of the Giant Mountains, which had been translated into English by Carroll's cousin Menella Bute Smedley in 1846. Historian Sean B. Palmer suggests that Carroll was inspired by a section from Shakespeare's Hamlet, citing the lines: The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead / Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets from Act I, Scene i. Carroll makes later reference to the same lines from Hamlet Act I, Scene i in the 1869 poem Phantasmagoria. He wrote: Shakspeare I think it is who treats / Of Ghosts, in days of old, / Who 'gibbered in the Roman streets'.
The original purpose of Jabberwocky was to satirise both pretentious verse and ignorant literary critics. It was designed as verse showing how not to write verse before eventually becoming the subject of serious classroom learning.
John Tenniel reluctantly agreed to illustrate the book in 1871, and his illustrations are still the defining images of the poem. The illustration of the Jabberwock may reflect the contemporary Victorian obsession with natural history and the fast-evolving sciences of palaeontology and geology. Stephen Prickett notes that in the context of Darwin and Mantell's publications and vast exhibitions of dinosaurs, such as those at the Crystal Palace from 1854, it is unsurprising that Tenniel gave the Jabberwock the leathery wings of a pterodactyl and the long scaly neck and tail of a sauropod. The Jabberwock is often depicted as a monster similar to a dragon, with a long serpentine neck, rabbit-like teeth, spidery talons, bat-like wings, and, as a humorous touch, a waistcoat. In the 2010 film version of Alice in Wonderland it is shown with large back legs, small dinosaur-like front legs, and on the ground it uses its wings as front legs like a pterosaur, and it breathes out lightning flashes rather than flame. The poem tells of the killing of a creature named the Jabberwock, and the hero of the story is a young boy who goes to the forest to kill the beast. The boy uses a vorpal sword, which is a magic sword capable of decapitating creatures struck by it in a single blow. The word vorpal has appeared in dictionaries as meaning both deadly and extremely sharp. The boy kills the Jabberwock and returns home to tell his father, who is overjoyed. The poem ends with the boy's father saying: He took his vorpal sword in hand: Long time the manxome foe he sought: So rested he by the Tumtum tree, And stood awhile in thought.
The Lexicon of Invention
Many of the words in the poem are playful nonce words of Carroll's own invention, without intended explicit meaning. When Alice has finished reading the poem she gives her impressions, and the character of Humpty Dumpty, in response to Alice's request, explains to her the non-sense words from the first stanza of the poem, but Carroll's personal commentary on several of the words differ from Humpty Dumpty's. For example, following the poem, a rath is described by Humpty Dumpty as a sort of green pig. Carroll's notes for the original in Mischmasch suggest 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 to certain Looking Glass editions state that the creature is a species of land turtle that lived on swallows and oysters. Later critics added their own interpretations of the lexicon, often without reference to Carroll's own contextual commentary. An extended analysis of the poem and Carroll's commentary is given in the book The Annotated Alice by Martin Gardner. In 1868, Carroll asked his publishers, Macmillan, Have you any means, or can you find any, for printing a page or two in the next volume of Alice in reverse? It may be that Carroll was wanting to print the whole poem in mirror writing. Macmillan responded that it would cost a great deal more to do, and this may have dissuaded him. In the author's note to the Christmas 1896 edition of Through the Looking-Glass Carroll writes, The new words, in the poem Jabberwocky, have given rise to some differences of opinion as to their pronunciation, so it may be well to give instructions on that point also. Pronounce slithy as if it were the two words, sly, thee: make the g hard in gyre and gimble: and pronounce rath to rhyme with bath.
The Translation Challenge
Jabberwocky has been translated into 65 languages, and the translation might be difficult because the poem holds to English syntax and many of the principal words of the poem are invented. Translators have generally dealt with them by creating equivalent words of their own. Often these are similar in spelling or sound to Carroll's while respecting the morphology of the language they are being translated into. In Frank L. Warrin's French translation, 'Twas brillig becomes Il brilgue. In instances like this, both the original and the invented words echo actual words of Carroll's lexicon, but not necessarily ones with similar meanings. Translators have invented words which draw on root words with meanings similar to the English roots used by Carroll. Douglas Hofstadter noted in his essay Translations of Jabberwocky, the word slithy, for example, echoes the English slimy, slither, slippery, lithe and sly. A French translation that uses lubricilleux for slithy, evokes French words like lubrifier to give an impression of a meaning similar to that of Carroll's word. In his exploration of the translation challenge, Hofstadter asks what if a word does exist, but it is very intellectual-sounding and Latinate, rather than earthy and Anglo-Saxon? Perhaps huilasse would be better than lubricilleux? Or does the Latin origin of the word lubricilleux not make itself felt to a speaker of French in the way that it would if it were an English word? In 1967, D.G. Orlovskaya wrote a popular Russian translation of Jabberwocky entitled Barmaglot. She translated Barmaglot for Jabberwock, Brandashmyg for Bandersnatch while myumsiki echoes mimsy. Full translations of Jabberwocky into French and German can be found in The Annotated Alice along with a discussion of why some translation decisions were made. Chao Yuen Ren, a Chinese linguist, translated the poem into Chinese by inventing characters to imitate what Rob Gifford of National Public Radio refers to as the slithy toves that gyred and gimbled in the wabe of Carroll's original. Satyajit Ray, a film-maker, translated the work into Bengali and concrete poet Augusto de Campos created a Brazilian Portuguese version. There is also an Arabic translation by Wael Al-Mahdi, and at least two into Croatian. Multiple translations into Latin were made within the first weeks of Carroll's original publication. In a 1964 article, M. L. West published two versions of the poem in Ancient Greek that exemplify the respective styles of the epic poets Homer and Nonnus.
The Satire of Scholarship
According to Chesterton and Green and others, the original purpose of Jabberwocky was to satirise both pretentious verse and ignorant literary critics. It was designed as verse showing how not to write verse, but eventually became the subject of pedestrian translation or explanation and incorporated into classroom learning. It has also been interpreted as a parody of contemporary Oxford scholarship and specifically the story of how Benjamin Jowett, the notoriously agnostic Professor of Greek at Oxford, and Master of Balliol, came to sign the Thirty-Nine Articles, as an Anglican statement of faith, to save his job. The transformation of audience perception from satire to seriousness was in a large part predicted by G. K. Chesterton, who wrote in 1932, Poor, poor, little Alice! She has not only been caught and made to do lessons; she has been forced to inflict lessons on others. It is often now cited as one of the greatest nonsense poems written in English, the source for countless parodies and tributes. In most cases the writers have changed the nonsense words into words relating to the parodied subject, as in Frank Jacobs's If Lewis Carroll Were a Hollywood Press Agent in the Thirties in Mad for Better or Verse. Other writers use the poem as a form, much like a sonnet, and create their own words for it as in Strunklemiss by Shay K. Azoulay or the poem Oh Freddled Gruntbuggly recited by Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz in Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a 1979 book which contains numerous other references and homages to Carroll's work. Some of the words that Carroll created, such as chortled and galumphing, have entered the English language and are listed in the Oxford English Dictionary. The word jabberwocky itself has come to refer to nonsense language. In American Sign Language, Eric Malzkuhn invented the sign for chortled. It unintentionally caught on and became a part of American Sign Language's lexicon as well.
The Cultural Legacy
A song called Beware the Jabberwock was written for Disney's 1951 animated film Alice in Wonderland sung by Stan Freberg, but it was discarded, replaced with 'Twas Brillig, sung by the Cheshire Cat, that includes the first stanza of Jabberwocky. The Alice in Wonderland sculpture in Central Park in Manhattan, New York City, has at its base, among other inscriptions, a line from Jabberwocky. The British group Boeing Duveen and The Beautiful Soup released a single in 1968 called Jabberwock based on the poem. Singer and songwriter Donovan put the poem to music on his album HMS Donovan in 1971. The poem was a source of inspiration for Jan Švankmajer's 1971 short film Žvahlav aneb šatičky slaměného Huberta, released as Jabberwocky in English, and Terry Gilliam's 1977 feature film Jabberwocky. In 1972, the American composer Sam Pottle put the poem to music. The stage musical Jabberwocky in 1973 by Andrew Kay, Malcolm Middleton and Peter Phillips, follows the basic plot of the poem. Keyboardists Clive Nolan and Oliver Wakeman released a musical version Jabberwocky in 1999 with the poem read in segments by Rick Wakeman. British contemporary lieder group Fall in Green set the poem to music for a single release in 2021 on Cornutopia Music. In 1975, the musical group Ambrosia included the text of Jabberwocky in the lyrics of Mama Frog on their debut album Ambrosia. In 1980 The Muppet Show staged a full version of Jabberwocky for TV viewing, with the Jabberwock and other creatures played by Muppets closely based on Tenniel's original illustrations. According to Jaques and Giddens, it distinguished itself by stressing the humor and nonsense of the poem. In 1981, the Jabberwock was published as a monster for Dungeons & Dragons in the magazine Dragon. It was later published in Monstrous Compendium in 1996 and in The Wild Beyond the Witchlight in 2021. Additionally, the Vorpal Sword is a magic sword capable of decapitating creatures struck by it in a single blow. The Jabberwock appears in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland in 2010, voiced by Christopher Lee, and is referred to as The Jabberwocky. An abridged version of the poem is spoken by the Mad Hatter, played by Johnny Depp. In 2016, the musical group Weezer included the text of Jabberwocky in the lyrics of L.A. Girlz which was included on their tenth studio album Weezer.