Jabberwock

The book opens the wrong way round. Alice, newly arrived on the far side of the drawing-room mirror, picks up a volume lying on a table and finds every line printed backwards. She holds it up to the glass, the letters flip into order, and she reads a ballad about a monster. When she finishes she admits it seems very pretty but rather hard to understand. Somebody, she says, killed something. That much is clear.

The somebody is a boy and the something is the Jabberwock. The poem is “Jabberwocky”, printed in the first chapter of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There in December 1871, and it is the whole of the creature’s existence. There is no older folk Jabberwock behind it, no village tale, no medieval bestiary entry. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the Oxford mathematician who wrote as Lewis Carroll, made the beast up. He made it up in two stages, sixteen years apart.

The first stage was a joke. In 1855, writing at his family’s home in Croft-on-Tees in North Yorkshire, the young Dodgson filled a homemade family magazine called Mischmasch with drawings and verse for his brothers and sisters. One item was a single four-line stanza, presented with mock solemnity as a recovered fragment of Anglo-Saxon poetry, complete with a straight-faced glossary. It described an evening scene of strange creatures doing strange things, in words that existed nowhere else. It had no monster in it at all. The monster arrived later, when Carroll took that old nonsense stanza, wrote a ballad around it, and used it as the frame at both ends of the new poem.

The story the ballad tells is a classic dragon-slaying in miniature. A father warns his son about three dangers: the Jabberwock with its teeth and talons, a bird called the Jubjub, and a furious beast called the Bandersnatch. The boy takes up a sword with a coined name, goes hunting for a long time, and finally stops to rest beneath a tree, lost in thought. Then the Jabberwock comes for him. Its eyes are on fire. It comes blundering through the thick wood making a bubbling, burbling sound. Two strokes of the blade, a sharp onomatopoeic snap of steel, and it is dead. The boy cuts off its head and carries it home at a clumsy, triumphant lope, and his father hugs him and laughs aloud with joy. Then the opening stanza repeats, the creatures of the evening go back to their business, and the world settles as if nothing had happened.

That is the full textual record of the Jabberwock. It has a jaw, claws, eyes and a voice. Carroll never says how big it is, what colour it is, whether it flies, or where it came from. He never tells the boy’s name or explains why the beast was in the wood. Later in the book, when Alice meets Humpty Dumpty, the egg cheerfully explains several of the poem’s invented words, but he says nothing about the monster itself. The creature at the centre of the most famous nonsense poem in English is described in roughly a dozen words.

The rest of the Jabberwock belongs to John Tenniel. The Punch cartoonist who had illustrated Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland agreed, with some reluctance, to illustrate the sequel, and his engraving of the battle fixed the monster’s look for every reader since. Tenniel drew a towering thing on two legs with a long, coiled, scaly neck, leathery bat wings, long spidery claws, protruding front teeth and wide staring eyes, facing a small armoured boy with his sword raised. The beast also wears a buttoned waistcoat. Nobody has ever explained the waistcoat. It was simply there, and it has stayed there.

The picture worried its own author. Carroll had planned to use it as the book’s frontispiece, the first image a child would see on opening the volume. He then grew anxious that it was too terrible for nervous children, and according to the Victoria and Albert Museum’s account he sent proofs to about thirty acquaintances, mostly mothers, asking whether it should stay. Enough of them said it was too frightening that he moved it into the text and put a gentle portrait of the White Knight at the front instead.

Where the creature came from is a game scholars have played for a century. Carroll wrote most of the ballad while staying with relatives near Sunderland, in country thick with its own monster stories, and the Lambton Worm and the Sockburn Worm, two northern English dragon legends of heroes killing great serpents, are the parallels most often named. Roger Lancelyn Green proposed that the poem parodies a long German ballad, “The Shepherd of the Giant Mountains”, which Carroll’s cousin Menella Bute Smedley had translated into English in 1846. Carroll himself offered only the name. When pupils at a girls’ school in Boston asked permission to call their magazine The Jabberwock, he wrote back granting it and explaining the word: jabber, in the sense of excited and voluble talk, joined to an Old English root meaning offspring or fruit. A Jabberwock, by its creator’s account, is what comes out of a lot of excited arguing.

Since 1871 the monster has walked off the page into a long afterlife. It has appeared in stage and screen versions of the Alice books, including a 1985 television film and Tim Burton’s 2010 Alice in Wonderland, where the creature was voiced by Christopher Lee and the vorpal sword became a plot device. The poem’s own word, jabberwocky, now means any nonsense language, and two of Carroll’s coinages from the same lines, chortle and galumph, are in ordinary English dictionaries.

The Jabberwock’s power is the power of a thing barely seen. Fire-eyed, fast and loud, it charges out of the dark with teeth and claws and nothing else to explain it, which is exactly why it frightens. Its weakness is just as plain. It dies the moment it meets a single determined boy with the right sword. Two strokes and a decapitation, and the monster of English nonsense is gone before the poem is half over.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Jabberwock?

The Jabberwock is the monster in “Jabberwocky”, a nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll printed in Through the Looking-Glass in 1871. In the poem a father warns his son about it, and the son hunts it down and kills it with a sword. It is a literary creature, invented by Carroll, with no older folk tradition behind it.

What does the Jabberwock look like?

Lewis Carroll’s poem gives the Jabberwock only biting jaws, catching claws and eyes of flame. The familiar image of a winged, long-necked, scaly beast with buck teeth and a waistcoat comes from John Tenniel’s 1871 illustration for Through the Looking-Glass.

What does the word Jabberwock mean?

Lewis Carroll explained the name in a letter to a girls’ school in Boston that wanted to call its magazine The Jabberwock. He said it joined “jabber”, meaning excited and voluble talk, to an Old English word for offspring or fruit. By his account the name means the result of a lot of excited discussion.

Who kills the Jabberwock?

An unnamed young man, called only “my son” by his father in the poem, kills the Jabberwock. He uses a sword, strikes it twice, cuts off its head and carries the head home in triumph.

Was the Jabberwock picture too scary for children?

Lewis Carroll thought it might be. He planned to use Tenniel’s Jabberwock as the frontispiece of Through the Looking-Glass but asked about thirty acquaintances, mostly mothers, for their opinion. Enough of them found it too frightening that he moved it inside the book and used a picture of the White Knight at the front instead.

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