• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

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 top of the hill, and the ‘borogoves’ were afraid that their nests would be undermined. The hill was probably full of the nests of the ‘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 (The Lewis Carroll Picture Book, ed. Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, 1899, pp. 3–8).

‘Jabberwocky’ therefore began as a parody of current philological scholarship and the nineteenth-century revival of early English texts. Five new stanzas are added to it in Through the Looking-Glass where the original stanza is now used to begin and end what appears to be another obscure ‘relic of ancient poetry’, a quasi-heroic narrative poem in which, as in Beowulf, a fabulous monster is slain.

The most authoritative commentator on the idiom of the poem as a whole is probably Humpty Dumpty in chapter 6 (pp. 187–9), but given the eccentricity of his apparently authoritative definition of the word ‘glory’ in the same chapter, readers should perhaps be wary of his linguistic exegesis of the nonsense lexicon of ‘Jabberwocky’ though it often coincides with that given in ‘Misch-Masch’. The notes on the poem that follow are supplements to the explanations given by Carroll in ‘Misch-Masch’ (quoted above) and by Humpty Dumpty in chapter 6.

12 slithy toves. Carroll gives some information on pronunciation in the preface to The Hunting of the Snark:

The ‘i’ in ‘slithy’ is long, as in ‘writhe’; and ‘toves’ is pronounced so as to rhyme with ‘groves’. Again, 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 OED gives ‘slithy’ as an obsolete variant of ‘sleathy’ meaning ‘slovenly’, as in W. Whately’s God’s Husbandry: ‘We make no great matter of the lower degrees of sinne, and so grow slithy’ (1622). Humpty Dumpty on the other hand defines it as a ‘portmanteau word’ combining ‘lithe’ and ‘slimy’ (p. 187).

13 gyre and gimble. Humpty Dumpty defines them respectively as ‘to go round and round like a gyroscope’ and ‘to make holes like a gimlet’. OED gives ‘gyre’ as a poetic term for ‘to turn round, revolve, whirl, gyrate’, in use from as early as the fifteenth century, and gives ‘gimbal’ as a noun meaning a joint or ring in various specialized contexts. ‘Gimble’ here is clearly a verb, and might suggest gambolling under the influence of gin as well as ‘making holes like a gimblet’. In Tenniel’s illustration to the first stanza in chapter 6, the toves are indeed like badgers, lizards and corkscrews, as Humpty Dumpty says they are, and are clearly perfectly-equipped for gyring and gimbling.

14 mimsy. OED gives this as ‘Prim, prudish, contemptible’ – though the first instance is dated 1880 and both its examples post-date Carroll’s poem. Humpty Dumpty explains it as a portmanteau word meaning ‘flimsy and miserable’. It reappears in The Hunting of the Snark,‘And chanted with mimsiest tones’ (fit 7, verse 9).

15 mome raths. OED has ‘mome’ as a noun meaning a ‘blockhead’ or ‘carping critic’ (from Latin momus), and as a dialect adjective meaning ‘soft’. ‘Rath’ is an Irish word for an archaic fortified enclosure, as in R. C. Hoare’s Tour of Ireland (1807), ‘one of those raised earthworks the Irish writers call raths’. Humpty Dumpty’s dubious explanation of ‘rath’ as a ‘green pig’ (p. 189) may therefore be a garbled reference to Irish history. Uncharacteristically he is ‘uncertain’ about ‘mome’ but thinks it is short for ‘from home’, i.e. ‘lost’.

16 outgrabe. Compare The Hunting of the Snark, Fit 5, verse 10: ‘But it fairly lost heart, and outgrabe in despair’. Though there are obvious English analogies for this verb form, such as ‘outgrew