Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll

First published: 1871, in Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There

Type of poem: Lyric

The Poem

“Jabberwocky,” possibly the most famous of all nonsense poems, consists of seven stanzas, each of four lines, each line having eight syllables. The orthodox form and the fixed rhythm provide a framework whose rigidity further emphasizes the nonsensical quality of each individual line. Because the final stanza is an exact repetition of the first, these two units, unrelated in content to the remainder, perform a parenthetical function. The five stanzas thus bracketed contain a consecutive narrative in which a young man, having received a series of warnings, rides away to find and kill the monstrous Jabberwock and then returns to his delighted father.

When the first stanza appeared separately it was represented as a “Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry,” and all the unfamiliar words were footnoted as if they were medieval terms whose meanings had been rendered obsolete or lost. In the interests of maintaining this parodic imposture, three of the key words were rendered “bryllyg,” “slythy,” and “gymble,” but Carroll reverted to more orthodox spellings when he introduced the lines into a different context.

Forms and Devices

The original version of the first stanza is a humorous pastiche of scholarly versions of Old English poems such as Beowulf (sixth century). Carroll’s notes are an exercise in etymological slapstick, according to which “bryllyg” is derived from the verb “to bryl or broil” and thus refers to the time of broiling dinner, or the late afternoon. “Slythy” is a compound of slimy and lithe, meaning “smooth and active”; “tove” is a species of badger with horns like a stag, which lived chiefly on cheese. “Gyre” is derived from “giaour”—here said to mean “dog,” although it actually means “infidel” and had acquired more sinister implications by way of George Gordon, Lord Byron’s poem “The Giaour”—and means “to scratch like a dog.”

“Gymble” means “to screw holes” and is the alleged origin of “gimblet” (gimlet); “wabe” is derived from the verb “to swab or soak” and refers, by casually mysterious means, to the side of a hill; “mimsy” means unhappy, and thus provides the root, via “mimserable,” of “miserable.” “Borogove” is an extinct species of parrot, which was wingless, possessed of an upturned beak, nested under sundials and lived on veal; “mome”—from which evolved “solemome,” “solemone,” and ultimately “solemn”—means “grave.” “Rath” is a species of land turtle that had a mouth like a shark, walked on its knees, and lived on swallows and oysters; “outgrabe,” the past tense of the verb “to outgribe,” is related to several words, including “grike,” “shrike,” “shriek,” and “creak,” and thus means “squeaked.”

Some of these meanings are retained when the version of the stanza used in Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There is explained in chapter 6 by Humpty Dumpty, although he claims that toves are only “something like badgers,” also having affinities with lizards and corkscrews. According to Humpty Dumpty it is they, rather than borogoves, that nest under sundials, although their propensity for cheese is retained. He scrupulously gives the correct meaning of “gyre,” which is “to go round and round like a gyroscope,” but claims that a rath is a green pig. It is, however, Alice who suggests—sarcastically, although Humpty Dumpty endorses the conclusion—that a wabe must be a grass plot around a sundial. Gyre is not the only word used in the stanza that had a real meaning, but it seems unlikely that Carroll expected his readers to know—even if he knew himself—that “slithy” was a variant of an obsolete term meaning “slovenly,” that “gimble” is a variant of “gimbal,” that “mome” had several obsolete meanings, or that “rath” is an Irish word for a fortified enclosure.

The invented words distributed in a slightly more economical fashion through the five enclosed stanzas mostly went unannotated by Carroll, although he did comment further on some of the eight that he used again in The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits (1876). In a preface to the later poem he explains that “frumious” is a slurred compound of “fuming” and “furious,” while a letter written in 1877 declares that “uffish” is “a state of mind when the voice is gruffish, the manner roughish, and the temper huffish.” Another letter, replying to some Boston schoolgirls who wanted to call a magazine The Jabberwock, obligingly deciphered this term as a compound of “jabber” and the allegedly Anglo-Saxon “wocer” or “wocor,” meaning “offspring” or “fruit,” thus making the whole “the result of much excited discussion.”

In response to queries regarding the meanings of “vorpal” and “tulgey,” however, he confessed his ignorance. Although no evidence survives of his derivation of “frabjous” the example of frumious suggests that it might be an amalgam of “rejoice” and “fabulous,” and the Oxford English Dictionary speculates, similarly, that “galumph” is an amalgam of “gallop” and “triumphant.”

Many of the words deployed for the first time in these verses have entered common usage, “chortle” being the most popular. Paradoxically, the real words used in the enclosed stanzas seem to have fallen out of fashion despite their citation; few people nowadays refer to a “burbling brook,” describe happy expressions as “beamish,” or employ “whiffling” in any of its actual or metaphorical senses. Humpty Dumpty’s explanations have, however, inspired one further term; his judgment that the formation of “slithy” by packing two meanings into a single word is “like a portmanteau” originated the useful concept of a portmanteau word. There is no firmer evidence than this poem of the potential that well-crafted nonsense has to enrich both thought and oratory.