It is interesting to compare these explanations with those given by Humpty Dumpty in Chapter 6.
Few would dispute the fact that “Jabberwocky” is the greatest of all nonsense poems in English. It was so well known to English schoolboys in the late nineteenth century that five of its nonsense words appear casually in the conversation of students in Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky & Co. Alice herself, in the paragraph following the poem, puts her finger on the secret of the poem’s charm: “. . . it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t know exactly what they are.” Although the strange words have no precise meaning, they chime with subtle overtones.
There is an obvious similarity between nonsense verse of this sort and an abstract painting. The realistic artist is forced to copy nature, imposing on the copy as much as he can in the way of pleasing forms and colors; but the abstract artist is free to romp with the paint as much as he pleases. In similar fashion the nonsense poet does not have to search for ingenious ways of combining pattern and sense; he simply adopts a policy that is the opposite of the advice given by the Duchess in the previous book (see Chapter 9, Note 6)—he takes care of the sounds and allows the sense to take care of itself. The words he uses may suggest vague meanings, like an eye here and a foot there in a Picasso abstraction, or they may have no meaning at all—just a play of pleasant sounds like the play of nonobjective colors on a canvas.
Carroll was not, of course, the first to use this technique of double-talk in humorous verse. He was preceded by Edward Lear, and it is a curious fact that nowhere in the writings or letters of these two undisputed leaders of English nonsense did either of them refer to the other, nor is there evidence that they ever met. Since the time of Lear and Carroll there have been attempts to produce a more serious poetry of this sort—poems by the Dadaists, the Italian futurists, and Gertrude Stein, for example—but somehow when the technique is taken too seriously the results seem tiresome. I have yet to meet someone who could recite one of Miss Stein’s poetic efforts, but I have known a good many Carrollians who found that they knew the “Jabberwocky” by heart without ever having made a conscious effort to memorize it. Ogden Nash produced a fine piece of nonsense in his poem “Geddondillo” (“The Sharrot scudders nights in the quastran now, / The dorlim slinks undeceded in the grost . . .”), but even here there seems to be a bit too much straining for effect, whereas “Jabberwocky” has a careless lilt and perfection that makes it the unique thing it is.
“Jabberwocky” was a favorite of the British astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington and is alluded to several times in his writings. In New Pathways in Science he likens the abstract syntactical structure of the poem to that modern branch of mathematics known as group theory. In The Nature of the Physical World he points out that the physicist’s description of an elementary particle is really a kind of Jabberwocky; words applied to “something unknown” that is “doing we don’t know what.” Because the description contains numbers, science is able to impose a certain amount of order on the phenomena and to make successful predictions about them.
“By contemplating eight circulating electrons in one atom and seven circulating electrons in another,” Eddington writes,
we begin to realize the difference between oxygen and nitrogen. Eight slithy toves gyre and gimble in the oxygen wabe; seven in nitrogen. By admitting a few numbers even “Jabberwocky” may become scientific. We can now venture on a prediction; if one of its toves escapes, oxygen will be masquerading in a garb properly belonging to nitrogen. In the stars and nebulae we do find such wolves in sheep’s clothing which might otherwise have startled us. It would not be a bad reminder of the essential unknownness of the fundamental entities of physics to translate it into “Jabberwocky”; provided all numbers—all metrical attributes—are unchanged, it does not suffer in the least.
“Jabberwocky” has been translated skillfully into several languages. There are two Latin versions. One by Augustus A. Vansittart, fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, was issued as a pamphlet by the Oxford University Press in 1881 and will be found on page 144 of Stuart Collingwood’s biography of Carroll. The other version, by Carroll’s uncle, Hassard H. Dodgson, is in The Lewis Carroll Picture Book on page 364. (The Gaberbocchus Press, a whimsical London publishing house, derives its name from Uncle Hassard’s Latin word for Jabberwock.)
The following French translation by Frank L. Warrin first appeared in The New Yorker (January 10, 1931). (I quote from Mrs. Lennon’s book, where it is reprinted.)
Le Jaseroque
Il brilgue: les tôves lubricilleux
Se gyrent en vrillant dans le guave,
Enmîmés sont les gougebosqueux,
Et le mômerade horsgrave.
Garde-toi du Jaseroque, mon fils!
La gueule qui mord; la griffe qui prend!
Garde-toi de l’oiseau Jube, évite
Le frumieux Band-à-prend.
Son glaive vorpal en main il va-
T-à la recherche du fauve manscant;
Puis arrivé à l’arbre Té-Té,
Il y reste, réfléchissant.
Pendant qu’il pense, tout uffusé
Le Jaseroque, à l’œil flambant,
Vient siblant par le bois tullegeais,
Et burbule en venant.
Un deux, un deux, par le milieu,
Le glaive vorpal fait pat-à-pan!
La bête défaite, avec sa tête,
Il rentre gallomphant.
As-tu tué le Jaseroque?
Viens à mon cœur, fils rayonnais!
O jour frabbejeais! Calleau! Callai!
Il cortule dans sa joie.
Il brilgue: les tôves lubricilleux
Se gyrent en vrillant dans le guave,
Enmîmés sont les gougebosqueux,
Et le mômerade horsgrave.
A magnificent German translation was made by Robert Scott, an eminent Greek scholar who had collaborated with Dean Liddell (Alice’s father) on a Greek lexicon. It first appeared in an article, “The Jabberwock Traced to Its True Source,” Macmillan’s Magazine (February 1872). Using the pseudonym of Thomas Chatterton, Scott tells of attending a séance at which the spirit of one Hermann von Schwindel insists that Carroll’s poem is simply an English translation of the following old German ballad:
Der Jammerwoch
Es brillig war. Die schlichte Toven
Wirrten und wimmelten in Waben;
Und aller-mümsige Burggoven
Die mohmen Räth’ ausgraben.
Bewahre doch vor Jammerwoch!
Die Zähne knirschen, Krallen kratzen!
Bewahr’ vor Jubjub—Vogel, vor
Frumiösen Banderschnätzchen!
Er griff sein vorpals Schwertchen zu,
Er suchte lang das manchsam’ Ding;
Dann, stehend unten Tumtum Baum,
Er an-zu-denken-fing.
Als stand er tief in Andacht auf,
Des Jammerwochen’s Augen-feuer
Durch tulgen Wald mit wiffek kam
Ein burbelnd ungeheuer!
Eins, Zwei! Eins, Zwei!
Und durch und durch
Sein vorpals Schwert
zerschnifer-schnück,
Da blieb es todt! Er, Kopf in Hand,
Geläumfig zog zurück.
Und schlugst Du ja den Jammerwoch?
Umarme mich, mien Böhm’ sches Kind!
O Freuden-Tag! O Halloo-Schlag!
Er chortelt froh-gesinnt.
Es brillig war, &c.
New translations of the Alice books keep appearing; there must be at least fifty different versions of “Jabberwocky” in fifty different languages. See my More Annotated Alice for a second French translation, and versions in Latin, Italian, Spanish, Russian, and Welsh.
Endless parodies of “Jabberwocky” have been attempted. Three of the best will be found on pages 36 and 37 of Carolyn Wells’s anthology, Such Nonsense (1918): “Somewhere-in-Europe Wocky,” “Footballwocky,” and “The Jabberwocky of the Publishers
” (“ ’Twas Harpers and the Little Browns / Did Houghton Mifflin the book . . .”). But I incline toward Chesterton’s dim view (expressed in his article on Carroll mentioned in the introduction) of all such efforts to do humorous imitations of something humorous.
In “Mimsy Were the Borogoves,” one of the best-known science fiction tales by Lewis Padgett (pen name for the collaborated work of the late Henry Kuttner and his wife, Catherine L. More), the words of “Jabberwocky” are revealed as symbols from a future language. Rightly understood, they explain a technique for entering a four-dimensional continuum. A similar notion is found in Fredric Brown’s magnificently funny mystery novel, Night of the Jabberwock. Brown’s narrator is an enthusiastic Carrollian. He learns from Yehudi Smith, apparently a member of a society of Carroll admirers called The Vorpal Blades, that Carroll’s fantasies are not fiction at all, but realistic reporting about another plane of existence. The clues of the fantasies are cleverly concealed in Carroll’s mathematical treatises, especially Curiosa Mathematica, and in his nonacrostic poems, which are really acrostics of a subtler kind. No Carrollian can afford to miss Night of the Jabberwock. It is an outstanding work of fiction that has close ties to the Alice books.
17. The Oxford English Dictionary lists slithy as a variant of sleathy, an obsolete word meaning slovenly, but in Chapter 6 Humpty Dumpty gives slithy a different interpretation.
18. Toves should be pronounced to rhyme with groves, Carroll tells us in his preface to The Hunting of the Snark.
19. The Oxford English Dictionary traces gyre back to 1420 as a word meaning to turn or whirl around. This agrees with Humpty Dumpty’s interpretation.
20. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, gimble is a variant spelling of gimbal. Gimbals are pivoted rings used for various purposes, such as suspending a ship’s compass so that it remains horizontal while the ship rolls. Humpty Dumpty makes clear, however, that the verb gimble is here used in a different sense.
21. Mimsy is the first of eight nonsense words in Jabberwocky that are used again in The Hunting of the Snark. It appears in Fit 7, verse 9: “And chanted in mimsiest tones.” In Carroll’s time, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, mimsey (with an e) meant “prim, prudish, contemptible.” Perhaps Carroll had this in mind.
22. In his preface to the Snark, Carroll writes: “The first ‘o’ in ‘borogoves’ is pronounced like the ‘o’ in ‘borrow.’ I have heard people try to give it the sound of the ‘o’ in ‘worry.’ Such is Human Perversity.” The word is commonly mispronounced as “borogroves” by Carrollian novitiates, and this misspelling even appears in some American editions of the book.
23. Mome has a number of obsolete meanings such as mother, a blockhead, a carping critic, a buffoon, none of which, judging from Humpty Dumpty’s interpretation, Carroll had in mind.
24. According to Humpty Dumpty, a rath is a green pig but in Carroll’s day it was a well-known old Irish word for an enclosure, usually a circular earthen wall, serving as a fort and place of residence for the head of a tribe.
25. “But it fairly lost heart, and outgrabe in despair,” Snark, Fit 5, verse 10.
26. The Jabberwock is not mentioned in the Snark, but in a letter to Mrs. Chataway (the mother of one of his child-friends) Carroll explains that the scene of the Snark is “an island frequented by the Jubjub and the Bandersnatch—no doubt the very island where the Jabberwock was slain.”
When a class in the Girls’ Latin School, Boston, asked Carroll’s permission to name their school magazine The Jabberwock, he replied:
Mr. Lewis Carroll has much pleasure in giving to the editors of the proposed magazine permission to use the title they wish for. He finds that the Anglo-Saxon word “wocer” or “wocor” signifies “offspring” or “fruit.” Taking “jabber” in its ordinary acceptation of “excited and voluble discussion,” this would give the meaning of “the result of much excited discussion.” Whether this phrase will have any application to the projected periodical, it will be for the future historian of American literature to determine. Mr. Carroll wishes all success to the forthcoming magazine.
27. The Jubjub is mentioned five times in the Snark: Fit 4, verse 18, and Fit 5, verses 8, 9, 21, and 29.
28. “. . . those frumious jaws,” Snark, Fit 7, verse 5. In the Snark’s preface Carroll writes:
For instance, take the two words “fuming” and “furious.” Make up your mind that you will say both words, but leave it unsettled which you will say first. Now open your mouth and speak. If your thoughts incline ever so little towards “fuming,” you will say “fuming-furious”; if they turn, by even a hair’s breadth, towards “furious,” you will say “furious-fuming”; but if you have that rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mind, you will say “fruminous.” Supposing that, when Pistol uttered the well-known words:
Under which king, Bezonian?
Speak or die!
Justice Shallow had felt certain that it was either William or Richard, but had not been able to settle which, so that he could not possibly say either name before the other, can it be doubted that, rather than die, he would have gasped out “Rilchiam!”?
29. The Bandersnatch is mentioned again in Chapter 7, and in the Snark, Fit 7, verses 3, 4, and 6.
30. Alexander L. Taylor, in his book on Carroll, The White Knight, shows how to get vorpal by taking letters alternately from verbal and gospel, but there is no evidence that Carroll resorted to such involved techniques in coining his words. In fact Carroll wrote to a child-friend: “I am afraid I can’t explain ‘vorpal blade’ for you—nor yet ‘tulgey wood.’ ”
31. Manx was the Celtic name for the Isle of Man, hence the word came to be used in England for anything pertaining to the island. Its language was called Manx, its inhabitants Manxmen, and so on. Whether Carroll had this in mind when he coined manxome is not known.
32. Tum-tum was a common colloquialism in Carroll’s day, referring to the sound of a stringed instrument, especially when monotonously strummed.
33. “The Bellman looked uffish, and wrinkled his brow,” Snark, Fit 4, verse 1. In a letter to child-friend Maud Standen, 1877, Carroll wrote that “uffish” suggested to him “a state of mind when the voice is gruffish, the manner roughish, and the temper huffish.”
34. Whiffling is not a Carrollian word. It had a variety of meanings in Carroll’s time, but usually had reference to blowing unsteadily in short puffs, hence it came to be a slang term for being variable and evasive. In an earlier century whiffling meant smoking and drinking.
35. “If you take the three verbs ‘bleat,’ ‘murmur,’ and ‘warble,’ ” Carroll wrote in the letter cited above, “and select the bits I have underlined, it certainly makes ‘burble’: though I am afraid I can’t distinctly remember having made it in that way.” The word (apparently a combination of burst and bubble) had long been used in England as a variant of bubble (e.g., the burbling brook), as well as a word meaning “to perplex, confuse, or muddle” (“His life fallen into a horribly burbled state,” the Oxford English Dictionary quotes from an 1883 letter of Mrs. Carlyle’s). In modern aeronautics burbling refers to the turbulence that develops when air is not flowing smoothly around an object.
36. Snickersnee is an old word for a large knife. It also means “to fight with a knife.” The Oxford English Dictionary quotes from The Mikado, Act 2: “As I gnashed my teeth, when from its sheath I drew my snicker-snee.”
37. “The Beaver went simply galumphing about,” Snark, Fit 4, verse 17. This Carrollian word has entered the Oxford English Dictionary, where it is attributed to Carroll and defined as a combination of gallop and triumphant, meaning “to march on exultantly with irregular bounding movements.”
38. Tenniel’s striking illustration for this stanza was originally intended as the book’s frontispiece, but it was so horrendous that Carroll feared it might be best to open the book on a milder scene. In 1871 he conducted a private poll of about thirty mothers by sending them the following printed letter:
So I am submitting the question to a number of friends, for which purpose I have had copies of the frontispiece printed off.
We have three courses open to us:
(1)To retain it as the frontispiece.
(2)To transfer it to its proper place in the book (where the ballad occurs which it is intended to illustrate) and substitute a new frontispiece.
(3)To omit it altogether.
The last named course would be a great sacrifice of the time and trouble which the picture cost, and it would be a pity to adopt it unless it is really necessary.
I should be grateful to have your opinion, (tested by exhibiting the picture to any children you think fit) as to which of these courses is best.
Evidently most of the mothers favored the second course, for the picture of the White Knight on horseback became the frontispiece.
Correspondent Mrs. Henry Morss, Jr., found a striking similarity between Tenniel’s Jabberwock and the dragon being slain by Saint George in a painting by Paolo Uccello, in London’s National Gallery. For other pictures of monsters that could have influenced Tenniel, see Chapter 8 of Michael Hancher’s The Tenniel Illustrations to the “Alice” Books.
39. “But oh, beamish nephew, beware of the day,” Snark, Fit 3, verse 10. This is not a word invented by Carroll. The Oxford English Dictionary traces it back to 1530 as a variant of beaming, meaning “shining brightly, radiant.”
40. A species of arctic duck that winters in northern Scotland is called the calloo after its evening call, “Calloo! Calloo!”
More likely, as readers Albert L. Blackwell and Mrs. Carlton S. Hyman each point out, Carroll had in mind two forms of a Greek word, kalos, meaning beautiful, good or fair. They would be pronounced as Carroll spells them, and would fit well the meaning of the line.
41. Chortled, a word coined by Carroll, also has worked its way into the Oxford English Dictionary, where it is defined as a blend of chuckle and snort.
The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition (The Annotated Books) Page 21