“Jabberwocky”
‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
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.
And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.
‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
from Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)a
I’m guessing a lot of us grew up reading books or watching movies of Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland. But even though the “Jabberwocky” is a nonsense poem and it’s in a fantastical and bizarre children’s story…have you ever wondered what it means? Alice herself marvels at how pretty, yet confusing the poem is. She says, “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are! However, somebody killed something: that’s clear, at any rate.”b However confusing, it does have this dark, epic feeling to it.
Within the book, Humpty Dumpty tries to clarify. “Toves” were similar to badgers and “borogroves” were like parrots with disheveled feathers. Though Humpty Dumpty offers help, Lewis Carrol made several different suggestions of what the words might mean both before and after the Alice books were written. Early in the poem, it says “the slithy toves / did gyre and gimble in the wabe.” Humpty Dumpty says that “gyre” means “to go round and round like a gyroscope.” Elsewhere, Carroll wrote that “gyre” meant “to scratch like a dog.”c
A good number of scholars have been spurred into deciphering what the words might mean and where they might come from. Does the word “snicker-snack” come from the large knife called a “snickersnee?”d Is “frabjous” a blend of the words “fair,” “fabulous,” and “joyous”?e We can note the proper syntax of the quatrains, its “ABAB rhyme scheme and…iambic meter.”f We can wonder at how this poem has been translated into 65 different languages! How did translators make new nonsense out of nonsense words?!g
Maybe if we try a different tack… Lewis Carroll himself – there must be hints there: born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson; lived in the 19th century; born in Daresbury, Cheshire; father a vicar; smile askew, stuttered, deaf in one ear, tall and thin.h He wrote almost a dozen books in the field of mathematics and invented something called the Dodgson condensation. I’m not sure I understand it, but it’s a, “method [that] computes the determinant of the matrix if no divisions by zero are encountered.”j
We’ve analyzed this poem by meter, word choice, etymology, context, tone, knowledge of the author. The question lingers: do we understand the “Jabberwocky” any better? Maybe…sort of…not really? I can speak for myself: learning this information may have deepened my appreciation for the poem, but it remains as much a mystery as it ever was. Trying to understand the Trinity can feel pretty similar.
Resources:
a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabberwocky
b https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabberwocky
c https://www.alice-in-wonderland.net/resources/analysis/poem-origins/jabberwocky/
d https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabberwocky
e https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabberwocky
f https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabberwocky
g https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabberwocky
h https://www.alice-in-wonderland.net/resources/background/lewis-carroll/
i https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Carroll
j https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodgson_condensation
k https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uzziah
l Acomb, D.E. “Cherub, Cherubim.” The Zondervan Encyclopedia of the Bible. Vol. 1. Merrill C. Tenney General Ed. (Zondervan: Grand Rapids, 2009), p. 820. & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherub