There is considerable speculation among atomic scientists about the possibility of creating antimatter in the laboratory, keeping it suspended in space by magnetic forces, then combining it with matter to achieve a total conversion of nuclear mass into energy (in contrast to both fusion and fission in which only a small portion of mass is so converted). The road to ultimate nuclear power may, therefore, lie on the other side of the looking glass.
7. For American readers: the chimneypiece is the mantel. A number of science-fiction writers have used the mirror as a device for joining our world to a parallel world: Henry S. Whitehead’s “The Trap,” Donald Wandrei’s “The Painted Mirror,” and Fritz Leiber’s “Midnight in the Mirror World” are three such stories.
8. Tenniel’s pictures of Alice passing through the mirror are worth studying. Observe that in the second illustration he added a grinning face to the back of the clock and to the lower part of the vase. It was a Victorian custom to put clocks and artificial flowers under glass bell jars. Less obvious is the gargoyle, sticking out its tongue, in the ornament at the top of the fireplace.
The pictures also show that Alice is not reversed on the other side of the glass. She continues to raise her right arm and to kneel on her right leg.
Note the name “Dalziel” at the bottom of both pictures, as well as on most of Tenniel’s illustrations in both Alice books. The Dalziel brothers were the wood engravers for all of Tenniel’s drawings. Observe also that Tenniel has reversed his monogram in the second picture.
We are told later on that the pictures on the wall near the fire seem to be alive. Peter Newell indicated this in his illustration of Alice emerging from the mirror. In the 1933 Paramount motion picture the pictures on the wall come alive and talk to Alice.
In all standard editions, the two pictures are on opposite sides of a leaf, as if the leaf itself was the mirror Alice passed through. A Puffin edition (1948) puts the pictures on its front and back covers, making the book the mirror.
9. Notice how Tenniel has suggested mirror reflections in his pairing of chess pieces in the illustration for this scene. Although Carroll never mentions bishops (perhaps out of deference to the clergy), they can be seen clearly in Tenniel’s drawing. Isaac Asimov’s mystery story “The Curious Omission,” in his Tales of the Black Widowers, derives from Carroll’s curious omission of chess bishops.
10. The White King’s slow struggle up the fender, from bar to bar, reflects the fact that although a chess king can move in any direction like a queen, it is allowed to move only from one square to the next. A queen can go as far as seven cells in one move, which explains the ability of queens later on to fly through the air, but it takes a king seven moves to go from one side of a chessboard to the other.
11. In chess play the loser often signifies defeat by turning his king flat on its back. As we soon learn, this is a moment of horror for the King, who naturally turns cold, like a person slain in combat. The Queen’s suggestion about making a memorandum of the event suggests the practice of recording chess moves so that a player won’t forget the game.
12. American readers have been puzzled by the Queen’s remark because Tenniel’s illustrations show the White King, both here and in Chapter 7, with mustache and beard. As Denis Crutch has pointed out, the Queen meant that the King has no sideburns. Crutch quotes a remark in Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno (Chapter 18) about a man’s face being “bounded on the North by a fringe of hair, on the East and West by a fringe of whiskers, and on the South by a fringe of beard.” In England, whiskers customarily means sideburns.
13. Automatic writing, as it was called, was a major aspect of the spiritualist craze in the nineteenth century. A disembodied spirit was believed to seize the hand of a psychic—Conan Doyle’s wife was an accomplished automatic writer—and produce messages from the Great Beyond. For my comments about Carroll’s interest in the occult, see Alice in Wonderland, Chapter 5, Note 7.
14. The poor balance of the White Knight on the poker foreshadows his poor balance on horseback when Alice meets him later in Chapter 8.
15. Carroll originally intended to print the entire “Jabberwocky” in reversed form, but later decided to limit this to the first verse. The fact that the printing appeared reversed to Alice is evidence that she herself was not reversed by her passage through the mirror. As explained earlier, there are now scientific reasons for suspecting that an unreversed Alice could not exist for more than a fraction of a second in a looking-glass world. (See also Chapter 5, Note 10.)
There are other reasons for assuming Alice was not mirror reflected. Many of Tenniel’s pictures in the first book show her right-handed, and she continues to be right-handed in his pictures for the second book. Peter Newell’s art is ambiguous on this point, though in Chapter 9 his Alice holds a scepter in her left hand, not in her right as Tenniel has it.
Alice has no difficulty reading the Wasp’s newspaper in the long-lost “Wasp in a Wig” episode, so presumably, unlike “Jabberwocky,” it was not reversed. Also unreversed are “DUM” and “DEE” on the collars of the Tweedle brothers, the label on the Mad Hatter’s top hat, and “Queen Alice” over the door in Chapter 9. Brian Kirshaw sent a detailed analysis of the left-right aspects of the book, all of which lead to the conclusion that neither Tenniel nor Carroll was consistent about who or what was mirror-reflected behind the looking glass.
16. The opening stanza of “Jabberwocky” first appeared in Mischmasch, the last of a series of private little “periodicals” that young Carroll wrote, illustrated and hand-lettered for the amusement of his brothers and sisters. In an issue dated 1855 (Carroll was then twenty-three), under the heading “Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry,” the following “curious fragment” appears:
Carroll then proceeds to interpret the words as follows:
BRYLLYG (derived from the verb to BRYL or BROIL), “the time of broiling dinner, i.e. the close of the afternoon.”
SLYTHY (compounded of SLIMY and LITHE). “Smooth and active.”
TOVE. A species of Badger. They had smooth white hair, long hind legs, and short horns like a stag; lived chiefly on cheese.
GYRE, verb (derived from GYAOUR or GIAOUR, “a dog”). To scratch like a dog.
GYMBLE (whence GIMBLET). “To screw out holes in anything.”
WABE (derived from the verb to SWAB or SOAK). “The side of a hill” (from its being soaked by the rain).
MIMSY (whence MIMSERABLE and MISERABLE). “Unhappy.”
BOROGOVE. An extinct kind of Parrot. They had no wings, beaks turned up, and made their nests under sundials: lived on veal.
MOME (hence SOLEMOME, SOLEMONE, and SOLEMN). “Grave.”
RATH. A species of land turtle. Head erect: mouth like a shark: forelegs curved out so that the animal walked on its knees: smooth green body: lived on swallows and oysters.
OUTGRABE, past tense of the verb to OUTGRIBE. (It is connected with old verb to GRIKE, or SHRIKE, from which are derived “shriek” and “creak”). “Squeaked.”
Hence the literal English of the passage is: “It was evening, and the smooth active badgers were scratching and boring holes in the hill-side; all unhappy were the parrots; and the grave turtles squeaked out.”
There were probably sundials on the top of the hill, and the “borogoves” were afraid that their nests would be undermined. The hill was probably full of the nests of “raths”, which ran out, squeaking with fear, on hearing the “toves” scratching outside. This is an obscure, but yet deeply-affecting, relic of ancient Poetry.
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.
The Annotated Alice Page 21