Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [156]
Es brillig war. Die schlichte Toven
Wirrten und wimmelten in Waben;
Und aller-mümsige Burrgoven
Die mohmen Räth’ ausgraben
(Macmillan’s Magazine, February 1872).
Carroll subsequently wrote to Scott thanking him for his interest ‘in the origin and history of my little ballad’ and enclosing ‘an attempt to trace it into a yet more remote antiquity’, his uncle Hassard Dodgson’s Latin translation (27 February 1872, Letters, vol I, p. 172). Scott went on to speculate that the ultimate original ‘may be discovered in Sanscrit’ – he postulated a Iabrivokaveda – and that ‘the Saga of Jabberwocky is one of the universal heirlooms which the Aryan race in its dispersion carried with it from the great cradle of the family’ (quoted in Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll, London, 1898, p. 143).
17 Jabberwock. Asked by girls from a Boston girls’ school whether they could name a magazine Jabberwock, Carroll in giving permission also furnished some commentary on the word itself:
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 and voluble discussion’ (3 February 1888, Letters, vol 2, p. 695).
OED defines ‘jabber’ as an onomatopoeic word meaning‘to talk volubly and with little sense, to chatter, gabble, prattle’; to ‘chatter’ or ‘gibber’ like monkeys or other animals; and ‘to speak (a foreign language) with the implication it is unintelligible to the hearer’. ‘Woce’ is an obsolete form of ‘voice’ while ‘woch’ is an alternative form of ‘vouch’ and ‘woke’ an early form of ‘weak’. Carroll’s own etymological explanation in the letter could be alternatively (and less flatteringly) construed as meaning ‘gibbering children’.
18 Jubjub bird.‘Jub’ is an obsolete word for a jerkin or a dialect word for the trot of a horse (OED). Carroll’s bird is more likely to be related to the nightingale whose call is traditionally rendered as jug jug’, i.e. the nightingale is a Jugjug bird. The Jubjub bird may be a ‘jabbering’ cousin. It rates several mentions in The Hunting of the Snark where it is described in some detail in the Beaver’s ‘Lesson in Natural History’ (Fit 5, verse 21):
As to temper the Jubjub’s a desperate bird.
Since it lives in perpetual passion:
Its taste in costume is entirely absurd –
It is ages ahead of the fashion.
19 Ityfrumious Bandersnatch. A ‘bander’, according to the OED, is ‘one who leads or leagues’, such as the ‘banders of the West’ in Scott’s Abbotsford; a ‘Bander-snatch’ might therefore be a beast that specializes in snatching banders. Later, in chapter 7, the King compares the passage of time to the momentum of the Bandersnatch (p. 198). It reappears in The Hunting of the Snark, Fit 7, where the Bandersnatch terrifies the Banker by grabbing him with his ‘frumious jaws’. In his preface to the Snark Carroll comments on the adjective:
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 ‘frumious’ (Complete Works of Lewis Carroll, ed. Alexander Woollcott, London, 1939, p. 678).
20 vorpal. In a letter to a child friend Carroll wrote: ‘I’m afraid I can’t explain “vorpal blade” for you – nor yet “tulgey wood”’ (18